the others were sitting, and laid the crumpled note
in front of them. 'Another trick of our friend Purvis,' he said
shortly.

The three men at the card-table bent their heads over the crumpled
piece of note-paper spread out before them. Ross smoothed out its
edges with his big hand, and the words became distinct enough; the very
brevity of the message was touched with sensationalism. It ran: 'I am
your brother. Save me!' and there was not another vestige of writing
on the paper.

'Purvis has excelled himself,' said Ross quietly. 'It's your deal,
Christopherson.'

Toffy mechanically shuffled the cards and looked up into his friend's
face. 'Is there anything else?' he said, and Peter took up the dirty
envelope and examined it more closely.

There was a scrap of folded paper in one corner, and on it was written
in his mother's handwriting a note to her husband, enclosing the
photograph of her eldest son in a white frock and tartan ribbons.

Peter flushed hotly as he read the letter. 'He has no business to
bring my mother's name into it,' he said savagely; and then the full
force of the thing smote him as he realised that perhaps his mother was
the mother of this man Purvis too.

'Have a drink?' said Ross, with a pretence of gruffness. It was
oppressively hot, and Peter had been riding all the previous night.
Ross mentioned these facts in a kindly voice to account for his loss of
colour. 'It's a ridiculous try on,' he said, with conviction; and
then, seeking about for an excuse to leave the two friends together to
discuss the matter, he gathered up the cards from the table, added the
score in an elaborate manner, and announced his intention of going to
bed.

Dunbar and the commissario had put a long distance between themselves
and the estancia house now. The silence of the hot night settled down
with its palpable mysterious weight upon the earth. The stars looked
farther away than usual in the fathomless vault of heaven, and the
world slumbered with a feeling of restlessness under the burden of the
aching solitude of the night. Some insects chirped outside the
illuminated window-pane, as though they would fain have left the large
and solitary splendour without and sought company in the humble room.
Time passed noiselessly, undisturbed even by the ticking of a clock.
To have stirred in a chair would have seemed to break some tangible
spell. A dog would have been better company than a man at the moment,