rk,
of the Double T Ranch. Dave was a better looker than me and a more
taking fellow, but somehow Frances favored me from the start. Dave
stayed till the finish, and when he seen he had lost he stood up with
me at the wedding. We had agreed, you see, that whoever won it wasn't to
break up our friendship.

"Well, Frankie and I were married, and in course of time we had two
children. My boy, Tom, is the older. The other was a little girl, named
after her mother." The cattleman waited a moment to steady his voice,
and spoke through teeth set deep in his Havana. "I haven't seen her, as
I said, since she was two years and ten months old--not since the night
Dave disappeared."

Bucky looked up quickly with a question on his lips, but he did not need
to word it.

Mackenzie nodded. "Yes, Dave took her with him when he lit out across
the line for Mexico."

But I'll have to go back to something that happened earlier. About three
months before this time Dave and me were riding through a cut in the
Sierra Diablo Mountains, when we came on a Mexican who had been wounded
by the Apaches. I reckon we had come along just in time to scare them
off before they finished him. We did our best for him, but he died in
about two hours. Before dying, he made us a present of a map we found
in his breast pocket. It showed the location of a very rich mine he had
found, and as he had no near kin he turned it over to us to do with as
we pleased.

"Just then the round-up came on, and we were too busy to pay much
attention to the mine. Each of us would have trusted the other with his
life, or so I thought. But we cut the paper in half, each of us keeping
one part, in order that nobody else could steal the secret from the one
that held the paper. The last time I had been in El Paso I had bought my
little girl a gold chain with two lockets pendent. These lockets opened
by a secret spring, and in one of them I put my half of the map. It
seemed as safe a place as I could devise, for the chain never left the
child's neck, and nobody except her mother, Dave, and I knew that it was
placed there. Dave hid his half under a rock that was known to both of
us. The strange thing about the story is that my false friend, in the
hurry of his flight, forgot to take his section of the map with him. I
found it under the rock next day, so that his vile treachery availed him
nothing from a mercenary point of view."

"Didn't take his half of the map with him. That's