necks in that
while you've been hiding out. Blackwell's lawyers succeeded in
persuading the Federal court to grant a temporary injunction, in spite
of everything we could do, and we are operating now under an indemnity
bond big enough to make your head swim. The hearing to determine
whether the injunction shall be dissolved or made permanent is timed
for next Monday."

"Heavens!" I ejaculated. "We can't let them tie us up!"

"I don't think they are going to be able to. Benedict is feeling a
little better now and he thinks he has them sewed up in a blanket, only
he won't tell me how, and you never can tell what's going to happen
when the lawyers get at you. There are lots of holes in the legal
skimmer: for example, at the preliminary hearing Blackwell had three
surveyors who went on the stand and swore flat-footed that the lines on
our side of the spur were all wrong; that the Lawrenceburg group of
claims covered not only our original triangle, but the Mary Mattock as
well. Paid-for perjury, of course, but we couldn't prove it; so there
you are."

At my urging Barrett would have gone into this phase of the trouble
more deeply, but just then Polly and her father came across the rotunda
and we all went to the dining-room together. I shall never forget, the
longest day I live, just where our table for four stood, and how a
group of gabbling tourists had the three or four tables nearest to us,
and how the lights, due to some trouble with the electric current,
winked now and then, like the stage lights in a theater ticking off the
cues.

We had got as far as the black coffees, and Barrett was joking Polly
and telling her that she shouldn't take sugar, when I saw, through a
vista of the tourists, a square-shouldered, dark-faced man rising from
his place at a distant table. There was no mistaking him. He was the
man I had seen in the dining-room of the hotel at the Grand Canyon.

As he came toward us between the tables the resemblance, which I had so
confidently assured myself was only a resemblance, transformed itself
slowly into the breath-cutting reality, and I was staring up, wild-eyed
and speechless, into the face of the deputy warden, Cummings, when he
tapped me on the shoulder and said, loud enough for the others to hear:

"You've led us a pretty long chase, Weyburn, but we don't often miss,
and it's ended at last. I guess you'll have to come with me, now."

XXII

A Woman's Love

It is useles