his, I think."

It was a pitiful job that Service and those with him had done for Old
Pete. Rolled head-first into a shallow hole--no doubt with jest and
laughter--it was his booted foot which first came to view, sticking
grotesquely up through the loose slide-stuff.

It was brief work and grim work that followed, and soon the weazened
form, bent and stiffened into something hardly human, lay in the soft
pink light on the canyon's floor.

Jim Banner knelt and examined it carefully and minutely, then every
man in the group did likewise. They found evidence of one simple,
staring fact--Old Pete had been shot squarely from behind, a little to
the left.

The bullet had undoubtedly pierced the heart--a great gaping hole in
the left centre of the breast in front attesting its course.

"Here," said Albright, coming back from a short distance down, beneath
the spray on the wall, "here's where something was taken up from th'
floor--th' blood he lost, I make no doubt."

"Gentlemen,--Miss Last," said Kenset, "I move we all move back and
leave the ground to Albright. There is fine work here."

With one accord the mass moved back, clearing a goodly space.

In the immediate vicinity there was little chance of doing anything,
for Service's bunch, and themselves, had trampled over the soft floor
until all original traces of the murder were blotted out.

Albright looked around and seemed to hesitate.

"Me, alone?" he asked. "Gimme Dick Compos, there."

"Done," said Kenset.

A tall, silent half-breed stepped forward and without another word the
two began to scan the walls, the floors, the heaps of rotted rock, the
loose and tumbled boulders, not yet decomposed, that lined the cut on
both sides.

They stood in their tracks and looked, and the concentration in their
eyes was akin to that in the eyes of a wild animal, hiding,
hard-pressed, and looking for a loophole for life.

The Vigilantes watched them in silence.

Presently Dick Compos stepped forward, leaned down and searched the
wall at the left. Then he went forward, bent over, scanning each inch.
He looked above and below, the height of a man's shoulders, his hips,
his knees.

Then he crept back, stopped at a particular upstanding piece of stone,
searched it closely--stepped in behind.

When he came out he looked over at Tharon Last standing at the head of
her people.

"Some one went along th' Wall here," he waved a slender brown hand at
the canyon face. "Thre