ously at the bills, but he demurred: "You mean we're
after them two again!"

"Hicks, we must be after them because one of them will soon be after
us."

"Where they goin' now?"

"Rockvale, Montana. That is, the girl's going. What I haven't found
out yet is whether Harry goes, too. If he stays here, I'll stay, and
you'll go West."

"After Pauline?"

"Ahead of her!"

"And then what?"

"Then you will have to use your own judgment. But don't get excited
and kill her, Hicks."

He accompanied the sharp warning with the alleviating roll of
yellowbacks, which Hicks quickly deposited in an inside pocket.

The next morning they shook hands at the gate of the Pennsylvania
station. Hicks looking a bit uncomfortable but much improved, in a
suit of new clothes, and carrying a suitcase, hurried to catch the
flyer for the West. A few hours later Owen was wishing a happy journey
to Pauline at the same station rail.

Mary Haines stood in the low doorway of the Double Cross ranch house
and gazed down the sun-baked road to where, in the far distance, a
little wisp of dust was visible.

Laughing, she turned and called to someone inside the house. A
towering, slow-moving, but quick-eyed man, in a flannel shirt, with
corduroys tucked into the tops of spurred boots, appeared on the
stoop. Hal Haines was so tall that his broad-brimmed hat grazed the
porch roof of the house.

"Hal! Hal!" she cried eagerly. "What do you think? Pauline Marvin is
coming to visit us--Pauline Marvin!"

"The little girl we met on the ship that I had to yarn to about the
wild West?"

"Yes, of course. How you did lie to her! Goodness, I hope that's not
why she's coming. She'll be awfully disappointed."

"Oh, I don't know as it's necessary to disappoint her," said Haines.
"If the State of Montana don't know how to entertain a lady from the
East as she likes to be entertained it's time to quit bein' a State at
all."

"Hal!" Mrs. Haines eyed her husband sternly. "I want you to remember
who Pauline Marvin is. I'm not going to have her frightened by any of
your wild jokes."

Haines burst into a ringing laugh.

"Honest, my dear, I promised that young lady if she ever came to
Rockvale she'd see all the Wild West I told her about. I gave her my
word. You don't want to make me out a liar, do you?"

"You can say that conditions have changed greatly in the last two
years."

"Oh, come, just one little hold-up the day she gets here. S