ot hold of it Sinclair could not know, but it was
certain that he would not leave the country without an effort to
recover the booty from Rebstock.

Whispering Smith turned the key in the door of his room as he revolved
the situation in his mind. Within, the dark was cheerless, but he made
no effort to light a lamp. Groping his way to the side of the low
bed, he sat down and put his head between his hands to think.

There was no help for it that he could see: he must meet Sinclair. The
situation he had dreaded most, from the moment Bucks asked him to come
back to the mountains, had come.

He thought of every phase of the outcome. If Sinclair should kill
him the difficulties were less. It would be unpleasant, certainly,
but something that might happen any time and at any man's hands.
He had cut into the game too long ago and with his eyes too wide
open to complain at this time of the possibility of an accident. They
might kill each other; but if, escaping himself, he should kill
Sinclair----

He came back in the silence always to that if. It rose dark between
him and the woman he loved--whom he had loved since she was a child
with school-girl eyes and braided hair. After he had lost her, only to
find years afterward that she was hardly less wretched in her life
than he in his, he had dreamed of the day when she might again be free
and he free to win a love long hoped for.

But to slay this man--her husband--in his inmost heart he felt it
would mean the raising of a bar as impalpable as fate, and as undying,
to all his dreams. Deserved or not, whatever she should say or not
say, what would she feel? How could her husband's death in that
encounter, if it ever came, be other than a stain that must shock and
wound her, no matter how much she should try not to see. Could either
of them ever quite forget it?

* * * * *

Kennedy and his men were guarding the Cache. Could they be sent
against Sinclair? That would be only a baser sort of murder--the
murder of his friends. He himself was leader, and so looked upon; the
post of danger was his.

He raised his head. Through the window came a faint light. The moon
was rising, and against the inner wall of the room the straight, hard
lines of the old wardrobe rose dimly. The rifles were within. He must
choose.

He walked to the window and pushed the curtain aside. It was dark
everywhere across the upper town, but in the distance one