sed his mind and was
dismissed as an unseemly bit of foolery in a matter so grave as
Lorraine's safety. And yet--the doctor had received a message that he
was wanted at the Quirt, and he had arrived before his patient. There
was no getting around that, however impossible it might be. No one
could have foreseen Brit's accident; no one save the man who had
prepared it for him, and he would be the last person to call for help.

"We followed the girl's horse-tracks almost to Thurman's place and lost
the trail there." Warfield turned in the saddle to look at Lone riding
behind him. "We made no particular effort to trace her from there,
because we were sure she would come on home. I'm going back that far,
and we'll pick up the trail, unless we find her at the ranch. She may
have hidden herself away. You can't," he added, "be sure of anything
where a demented person is concerned. They never act according to
logic or reason, and it is impossible to make any deductions as to
their probable movements."

Lone nodded, not daring to trust his tongue with speech just then. If
he were to protect Lorraine later on, he knew that he must not defend
her now.

"Hawkins told me she had some sort of hallucination that she had seen a
man killed at Rock City, when she was wandering around in that storm,"
Warfield went on in a careless, gossipy tone. "Just what was that
about, Lone? You're the one who found her and took her in to the
ranch, I believe. She somehow mixed her delusion up with Fred Thurman,
didn't she?"

Lone made a swift decision. He was afraid to appear to hesitate, so he
laughed his quiet little chuckle while he scrambled mentally for a
plausible lie.

"I don't know as she done that, quite," he drawled humorously. "She
was out of her head, all right, and talking wild, but I laid it to her
being sick and scared. She said a man was shot, and that she saw it
happen. And right on top of that she said she didn't think they ought
to stage a murder and a thunderstorm in the same scene, and thought
they ought to save the thunder and lightning for the murderer to make
his get-a-way by. She used to work for the moving pictures, and she
was going on about some wild-west picture she thought she was acting a
part in.

"Afterwards I told her what she'd been saying, and she seemed to kinda
remember it, like a bad dream she'd had. She told me she thought the
villain in one of the plays she acted in had pulled off a st