CHAPTER XI

THE VALOR OF SIMON

Henderson had waited all that day in the appointed place for Toberman, who was to bring him news of what he had learned regarding the feasibility of escaping out of that country by the northern road. It was within half an hour of sunset now, and no sign of Toberman.

Although he was well equipped with horse, pistol and clothing which Toberman had supplied him, out of his own resources, the overseer had given him to understand, placing the fugitive under no obligation on that score to the owner of the ranch, Henderson hesitated over making a start toward Monterey. Since coming to the Sprague ranch he had learned more of Abrahan Garvanza's power and influence in that part of California. A feudal baron never lived who could stretch a longer arm.

The governor of California, now stationed at Los Angeles, that pueblo having been made the capital lately, was a man under Don Abrahan's control. The forty soldiers who garrisoned the capital, given the choice between service in this distant land and completing their sentences for various felonies in the prisons at home, were at the beck and call of Don Abrahan, the general in command being a relative of the Garvanza family, owing his station to its wide influence.

Toberman had told Henderson, and Helena Sprague had confirmed it, that the news of his escape from Don Abrahan's enforced service would have been carried to Monterey by the third day, incredible as it appeared to him. News spread with great rapidity among the Indians and lawless Mexicans who worked on the cattle ranches, and Don Abrahan had posted a reward of twenty dollars, gold, for the fugitive's capture and return.

Twenty dollars gold on the California coast in those pastoral days was equal to four head of cattle. A laborer would toil many months to earn that much. A _vaquero_ did not gain a sum like it in half a year's riding after the herds. It would not be a matter of enmity toward him, Henderson understood, but the plain business one of making a handsome sum of money quickly, that would set the hand of every man, high and low, between Los Angeles and Monterey against his passage.

But there was an obscure way through the mountains, Toberman had told him, long and rough, that might lead to freedom if a trustworthy guide could be found. There seemed to be none in his employ whom he would trust in that capacity. It was on this business that Toberman had engaged to return this day and report.

Henderson watched the valley for his coming from the peak of a hill which seemed a mountain that had sunk into the earth, a feature common to those rugged foothills. There was spread in the broad valley, running up into the inlets of the canyons, a haze of such density that it seemed as if the sea must have swept in to reclaim its ancient domain. This was as blue as the smoke of wood-fires, the Indian summer haze of other lands intensified until it seemed almost palpable; blue as the upper ether of the clearest October skies.

This strange inflooding of what seemed smoke from mysterious and hidden fires obscured the view of the valley, where it stood at a level against the walls of the hills as definitely marked as water. Above this level the little mountains stood clear and sharp. Henderson gazed out over this transformation, moved by a strange feeling of friendliness and desire for this land.

An hour ago the sun had fallen brightly upon garish shoulder of scrub-patched hill, upon yellow break of sand in the valley among the green. It had revealed harshly the forbidding features of the country, as daylight strips an aged beauty of her sad pretense. Now a veil had been drawn; the sublimity of the change was such as hurt the heart with longings for the sympathetic vibration that could quiver with it and make it wholly understood.

Henderson gave up his vigil on the hilltop at dusk, returning to his camp. This was a little hut built of boulders from a mountain stream, laid together with mud, a sheep herder's shelter against the winter rains. The place was a sequestered canyon, many miles from the homestead of the ranch, unfrequented by herdsmen at this season. Toberman had assured the fugitive that he might rest in security there until his affairs took a better turn.

This feeling, doubtful at first, had gradually laid its spell over Henderson as the days passed without sight of any human invasion. Toberman had conducted him to the place secretly, at night, by cunning ways which he believed left no track. Henderson's surprise was the greater, as a consequence of all this caution, to find Simon sitting placidly in the cabin door when he came down from watching the valley for Toberman.

Simon sat with his long knees updrawn, hands idly hooked in front of them, in the patient, immobile fashion such as becomes a habit in people only who have served long in subjugation and waited without hope. The tragedy of his race was in his pose, the watcher who had been set over other men's treasures, none of which he ever was destined to touch or share. But in Simon's case, at least, it was only a racial trait. There was nothing of humility in him, even in the presence of Don Abrahan, although of patience for long and unrewarded vigils he must have owned his share.

He rose at Henderson's approach, unfolding his thin length with considerable spryness, advancing with hand extended in demonstration of keen friendship.

"Is it you, my little friend Gabriel?" he hailed, great pleasure in his voice. "I thought you were dead, I thought the wolves had made a dinner on you. Come on, my boy. How are you, how have you passed?"

Henderson's horse was picketed some distance down the canyon; Simon was directly in the way between them. Henderson distrusted the friendly show, although Simon appeared to be unarmed and quite genuine in his expression of pleasure.

Henderson replied to the flood of affectionate inquiry that all was well with him; asked of Simon's family, according to the custom, shook hands with him, accepted a cigarette. He wondered whether Toberman had betrayed him, dismissing the suspicion at once as unworthy.

He could not know, certainly, of the little talk between Don Abrahan and Simon the night before, or of the small pieces of gold that had passed from the patron's hand in the dark. He could not have known, indeed, that the old men who sit in the sun, wrapped in introspection, see more than passes by them in the road.

"So, then, all is forgiven, my little Gabriel," Simon hastened to explain, with evidence of great joy in his news. "Don Abrahan has sent me, on the directions for finding you that the good John Toberman gave us. I have come with Don Abrahan's forgiveness in my hand for the wrong you did the good patron in running away from him. As for the little blow you gave Roberto, there is nobody in thirty miles that does not say bravo to that good deed."

"Toberman told you where to come, did he?"

Henderson questioned that declaration; it set a new current of suspicion and distrust running. Yet, on the other hand, Toberman might have sent Simon, saving himself the time from his activities that the journey would take. It seemed only the natural thing for a man of Toberman's consequence to do. He could not be expected to ride messenger in a matter that had lost its bottom like a barrel in the sun.

It must be that Don Abrahan had seen a new light. Perhaps the long-expected news had come from the north that the United States had seized California and added it to its domain. In such case, Don Abrahan's forgiveness would find a ready explanation.

"He says to tell you," Simon replied, "that there is no longer any need for you to think of going away to the north, and Don Abrahan speaks in the same voice. Don Abrahan says he will get you a ticket home in a ship that is in the harbor now, loading hides. It is a Boston ship, with such trees sticking out of it that it made my head swim to look at the tops of them. Yes. I, myself, saw this ship three days ago at the harbor. So you will return?"

"Are you here alone, Simon? There's no treachery in this?"

"As I hope to have two teeth when I am ninety, I am here alone, Gabriel."

"Where is your horse?"

"Down there in the canyon with yours, like a man that has come to dinner with his friend."

"And Don Abrahan said he'd let it all pass, the little trouble with Roberto, and everything?"

"Don Abrahan said, 'Tell my little son, Gabriel, that all is forgiven.' He said the ship would sail in three days. We must hurry, Gabriel."

"First, we can't do better than imitate our horses," Henderson said, his confidence growing, suspicion all but dispelled. "Let's get some supper before we start, Simon. I'm hungry; your news is good for the appetite."

Although largely assured by Simon's manner of open honesty, Henderson watched him closely. He had heard the mule driver air his peculiar morals often enough to ground deep and abiding distrust of his ability to do anything exactly straightforward. Simon was apparently unarmed, but Henderson suspected that a pistol was concealed somewhere in his loose clothing, ready to his hand.

"Don Abrahan has come to Helena Sprague's ranch, where he is waiting to welcome you and take you to his breast," Simon said, sitting in the light of the little fire after the hastily-prepared supper had been eaten. "We think he has found out something about you, that you are the son of a family, or something grand."

"And Roberto, is he there?"

"Roberto went on to Monterey today, I heard it said. What dark night it is here in the hills!"

"It will be darker before it's lighter. We'd better go."

"Yes, the ship will not wait, Don Abrahan will wonder at our delay. What was that?"

Simon started, listening, hand lifted to impose silence.

"Coyotes, very likely," Henderson replied, unconcerned. "They come around here at night."

"It sounded like a horse." Simon rose, leaning into the dark, listening hard, "If mine has got loose!"

He walked away a little distance, going softly, almost immediately disappearing in the dark, which was deeper for the wooded side of the canyon forming the background of the camp. Henderson heard him swearing presently around the corner of the hut, disturbing the bushes softly as if he sought a passage through.

"A bird in the bushes, I think," Simon said, turning back. "Do you leave your fire uncovered these dry days?"

"I drown it," Henderson said.

"Go ahead, then; we must get down out of this dark place. Don Abrahan will think I'm slower than seven doctors."

Henderson took up the pail to pour what water it contained over the dying fire. He was standing with it poised, held in both hands, when something came toward him from Simon's direction with the swishing sound of a bird's wing. Quick as the leaping of his intuitive warning that treachery was afoot behind him, Henderson stooped and sprang aside.

But Simon, with all the _vaquero's_ cunning in casting the lariat, had planned his part too carefully, and risked too much, to fail. The rope fell true to calculation, tightening with Simon's vicious jerk, binding Henderson's arms to his body, one impotent hand within a few inches of his pistol. Simon threw all his sinewy strength into the struggle that followed, cutting Henderson's resistance short by dragging him to the ground. In a moment additional coils of rope webbed the over-trustful sailor as a spider binds a bug.

Nothing was said between the men while this treacherous capture and desperate resistance were going forward. Now, when Simon had his prize securely tied and thrown on the ground, he stirred up the fire, added branches of dry cedar, and blew it to a blaze.

"So I, without a pistol on my body, take this smart Yankee and tie him like a hog," Simon boasted, great and arrogant satisfaction in his voice. He lifted his arms to display his body free of a belted pistol, and sat down near the fire, his back against a small tree.

"I'll remember this treachery, Simon, in the day that will come," Henderson said.

"The day that is coming for you is one when Roberto will cut you to pieces with his whip," Simon sneered. "Well, there is no hurry now. We will wait till daylight comes, then ride down the canyon. It would be foolish to arrive at midnight, for Don Abrahan would be asleep."

Simon smoked a while, legs stretched toward the fire, blowing smoke luxuriously, chin lifted high.

"What did I say to them when I left my pistol behind, all the foolish ones looking at me like men whose jaws were out of joint? I said, 'I need no pistol for this work. I am going to catch a Yankee, and that is not the same as a man.' When they see me come back with you, tied like a pig for sale in the plaza! seven doctors, what a laugh!"

(_To be continued in the next issue of_ SHORT STORIES)

THE PACKET ADMIRAL

BY WARREN ELLIOT CARLETON

_Author of "The Final Test," "The Harpoon Heritage," etc._

THE TRADITION OF THE SEA DIES HARD AMONG THE YANKEE SKIPPERS OF THE OLD SCHOOL--AND THE TRADITION IS FAITHFULLY LIVED UP TO

"Jumpin' Jehossyfat! I didn't know there was that many!"

Captain Ed Pierce preened his bushy gray mustache, his brown eyes staring at the six two-masted schooners comprising the Crosby fleet. Beside him, on the deck of the Boston and Howesport packet schooner, _Bessie Barker_, Captain Bert Blackmer also studied them. The Crosby fleet was lying at anchor in the "cowyard," the sheltered outer harbor of the decadent Cape Cod fishing town of Howesport.

"Looks like they mean business, don't it?" Captain Ed commented. "Bert, seems like perhaps you'd be wise to sell out while the sellin's good."

Captain Bert bit his lip. There was good sense in what Captain Ed had suggested. Captain Ed was shrewd. His investments had brought him opulence, made him Howesport's wealthiest citizen. Yes, Captain Ed's opinion was always worth weighing.

Captain Bert's tall, erect, thin yet sinewy frame, legs thrust wide apart, would have graced the quarterdeck of a finer craft than even the trim _Bessie Barker_. For twenty years he had successfully carried on the shipping business between Howesport and Boston. It was hard for him to give up now. His black hair and short beard, draping bold aquiline features, were turning gray. The old muscular strength of the days when he was in the South American trade had diminished with his increasing years, which had now piled up to sixty-four.

When he had discarded the _Mary Chilton_ and bought the _Bessie Barker_ two years ago, he had thought, "She'll last a lifetime. A few years more of service, and then--life ashore. Perhaps owner of a fleet of packets----"

He had never thought of such a thing as competition. People had laughed at him when he started the packet business twenty years ago. Howesport had the railroad. At best, it was a dead port.

"He'll never make it pay," they had said, and in derision had dubbed him "the Packet Admiral."

Yet he had made it pay. It hadn't made him rich like Captain Ed, but give him a few years' lease of life and with business growing as it had lately, and--Well, he _would_ be an admiral, of a line of packets plying between various ports and bringing him a small fortune, perhaps even wealth. That was all he asked--a few more years like the last five. But now--the Crosby Company.

"They've sold stock in town, too," said Captain Bert. "Mis' Mehitable Barnes fired a broadside into my hull this afternoon by informin' me that she'd bought twenty shares of it."

"Lord sakes--that so? I didn't know she was that well-to-do."

"She ain't. Took about her last cent. Seems she knows Crosby--he used to come here summers--and he coaxed her into it. Misrepresented things to her, too. Didn't tell her they intend to operate a packet business against me and cut my throat, in addition to their regular coastwise shippin'. No; Crosby outlined it to her wholly as a fleet of coastwise schooners."

"I vum!"

"Mehitable usually tells me all her business. But she sorter kept this a secret from everybody. You know women do that--once in a while."

"Folks here have said you've been kinder courtin' her late years. Funny she ain't let the cat out o' the bag 'fore this."

"Oh--just intimate friends, that's all." Captain Bert cleared his throat. "Still, for her it may be a good investment. But cripes! The air was sizzlin' when I told her Crosby's goin' to put a packet on 'tween here and Boston to compete with me!" he chuckled.

"Didn't like it, eh?"

"She vowed she'd git rid of them shares and give Crosby a piece of her mind to boot. But I told her to hang on to 'em, that it's an ill wind that blows nobody good, and she sorter calmed down. But I left her nigh cryin'."

A stalwart fellow jumped aboard from the wharf.

"Well, nigh supper time. Guess I'll be goin'," said Captain Ed, stepping on the rail and hoisting himself on to Robbins Wharf. "Looks like you're competin' against an awful stack of capital, Bert. But keep up your courage if you do fight it out. What you told the widder 'bout that ill wind might apply to you, too."

Whistling, Captain Ed walked down the wharf.

"The _Mary Chilton's_ all ready, Cap'n," spoke the big newcomer in a deep voice. He pointed over his shoulder at the old schooner, unused and falling to pieces on the other side of Robbins Wharf. "Everything's ready, sir," he repeated while Captain Bert hesitated before answering.

"All right, Bill."

Bill Hyde's speech and appearance--bulldog jaw, swarthy face and curly black hair sticking out from a shabby blue yachting cap--branded him a Yankee, but foreign to the Cape. Captain Bert had hired him two weeks ago at a Boston agency, after a long list of drunkards, thieves, and even one murderer who had sailed with him as his sole companion, first on the old _Mary Chilton_, and subsequently on the _Bessie Barker_. The captain liked Bill. He was frank, decisive, still exuberant with youth, and an all-round good shipmate. And the customer Bill had found him in Gloucester for the decrepit _Mary Chilton_----

"We'll clear for Gloucester in the _Mary Chilton_ right away," said the captain, "and come back on the mornin' train so's we can take the _Bessie_ to Boston tomorrow afternoon. You're sure, Bill, this customer you've got me ain't goin' to be disappointed in his bargain?"

"Disappointed? 'Course not. He isn't buying a yacht. Old hulks are what he always buys for hauling stone. He'll have her hull fixed up and she'll do well enough for a barge."

Across the harbor over the Herringbone a sandy strip of land running parallel to the Howesport waterfront and sheltering the outer harbor, the sun had set, only the rim of its globe now peering above the horizon. The decaying old fish piers on both sides of Robbins Wharf loomed hoary, deserted and sinister, ghosts of palmier days. Not a sound broke the silence save the squawk of a passing gull and the wash of the sea on the sides of the schooner.

Captain Blackmer still stood with a Napoleonic pose, looking out toward the vanishing sun.

"If 'twa'n't for the Widder Barnes," he remarked when its last radiance had faded and night shrouded the after-glow, "I'd be tempted to sail out and scuttle that whole Crosby fleet."

"And why stop because of the Widow Barnes?" asked Bill, suddenly interested. "I'm game to do it. I don't want to see you done out of business by that Crosby outfit. Jobs are scarce, and I'm quite satisfied with this one. Will you give me leave to dispose of those schooners for you?"

"Why, of course not! I just--was thinkin'--how anybody _might_ do it--that's all."

"It would be easy as----"

"Let's drop the subject. Come on aboard the _Mary_, Bill."

But the thought of striking underhandedly at the Crosby fleet was planted in Captain Bert's brain. The schooners had all been towed to Howesport from the shipyards by tugboats. It was doubtful whether their crews were yet organized; probably only a few men kept watch on the vessels while they lay in the Cowyard waiting for the Crosby Company to begin shipping operations.

"I've knocked around the water long enough to know that a new company like this Crosby outfit has fired all its ammunition in its opening shot," insisted Bill, while they prepared the _Mary Chilton_ for clearing Robbins Wharf. "Who ever heard of a new company in coastwise shipping starting out bang with six vessels? Two would be a plenty, for an opener. And they're all brand new two-masters, too. Must have cost a bunch of money. Cap'n, if we dispose of those schooners somehow, the Crosby Company is dead."

Captain Bert was silent a moment. It did seem logical. But the widow--she was so tormented scrupulous. Being honest, doing nobody wrong--that was about all he heard when he took frequent suppers and Sunday dinners with her. He had even dreamed that some day, if the packet business held good, he would make those meals permanent fixtures in his life by marrying the widow.

"Those old barrels in the hold--they're some the _Mary's_ owner-to-be asked me to fetch him," continued Bill. "There's a lot of dunnage in there with them. Lord, the _Mary's_ a regular floating junk shop!"

"She always was," drily commented the captain. "Leaks, rolls, and the deck is so rotten in places you'd go through if you stepped out a hornpipe. Any man who can sell her ought to be Secretary of the Navy."

It was nine o'clock when the _Mary Chilton_ cast off and headed under full sail down the harbor toward Cape Cod Bay. There was no moon, and a thin fog blew over the water in a fair June breeze. Captain Blackmer stood aft at the wheel. Bill was puttering around, first in the foc'sle, then in the hold.

The southwesterly breeze began to pick up off-shore. Dead ahead in the fog veil loomed the six schooners. Salt water politics! Captain Bert recollected that he had played them before. There was the time, when he was an A. B., that the old bark _Shannon Magec_ rammed the Dutch brig off the Brazilian coast, and he and the rest of the crew looted her cargo. He had never told Widow Barnes about that. Then, too, there were other things he had never told her--but what she didn't know wouldn't harm her.

Bill came up from the hold. He peered off through the fog toward the Crosby fleet.

"Lordy!" he exclaimed, coming aft toward the captain. "If we'd moored them ourselves we couldn't have placed them better for disposing of 'em. Look at 'em! Less than eight fathoms between 'em. Now ain't that just like a fool tugboat skipper and a company of greenhorns!"

Captain Bert bit his lip. Was he a coward? He--guided by the silly sentiments of a woman, a woman who had never gone to sea, who didn't own a packet that was to be run out of business; a woman who had bought shares in that damned Crosby fleet.

Bill had gone back to the hold. The captain hated to think of having to give up the packet and of losing his genial new shipmate. He recalled the former mates whom he had shipped on his two schooners. He thought of how this new one had taken hold, his ability as a navigator, his reliability as a companion. Bill had suggested striking at the Crosby fleet largely to safeguard his own job. But in so doing also to stabilize the captain's packet business. And if the widow were deprived of the money she had invested in the Crosby Company, it would make her all the more willing to be his wife--when he was ready to ask her.

Out of the hold wriggled a little braid of smoke. A small cloud puffed from the open hatch, followed by a dense black column that might have streamed from the funnel of an ocean liner. Bill emerged, coughing, and the crackling of burning wood sounded from below.

"God almighty!" shouted the captain. "What have you done?"

"The small boat's close to the companion," replied Bill calmly, designating the dinghy aft. "Head for the Crosby fleet--the nearest schooner."

"You damned traitor!" snarled the captain, starting forward. Bill blocked his way.

"I'm doing this--for you," he declared. "Those empty tar barrels in the hold--the _Mary's_ doomed. So is the Crosby fleet. It's self-preservation for you, sir. Such things have happened accidentally before. Nobody will ever suspect that this didn't. Get out the way; give me the wheel!"

Captain Bert felt himself shoved aside by a quick-moving giant who dashed to the wheel and swung it--then the lurch of the schooner--the creaking of the boom. Flames from the hold licked out of the hatch, and smoke poured to leeward toward the fleet.

"--the wind's right--their position's right. They're fresh with paint and varnish. Good-by, old Crosby fleet!" sang the fiend at the wheel.

Captain Bert was upon him. He had been a skilled fighter in his day. He struck out with his left fist at Bill's grinning face. But the mate stepped nimbly aside, ducked, and letting go the wheel, floored the captain with an uppercut to the chin.

"No time for fooling!" Bill roared. "Stay there, and do what I tell you. I'm in command until we've seen this thing through."

The ancient _Mary Chilton_ was a floating tinder box above her waterline. So rapidly did the flames catch on to the decks and bulkheads, it was doubtful whether a man could stay at the wheel long enough to bear down on the first schooner of the down-wind fleet.

"She's a floating hell!" bellowed Bill above the crackle and roar of the fire. "Get on your feet, old man! I need you. This is no one-man job."

Captain Bert, still groggy, his mind clouded by the blow Bill had given him, crawled to his feet. The smoke stifled him. Yes; Bill was right--it was not a one-man job. It wasn't a job for any man. Bill's eyes ran tears. Black smoke rolling out of the companionway shrouded him.

"Here--the wheel--take it!" Bill choked. Captain Bert grasped its spokes and held it steady, holding his breath in the dense smoke as long as he could, then stepping aside to clearer air, exhaling quickly and breathing again.

The wind, as if a partner in Bill's scheme, moved the smoke off the port quarter. Dimly, but looming more distinctly, the captain discerned the first schooner ahead. By standing at the starboard side of the wheel, Bill and he could keep their eyes on the fleet.

"Look!" Captain Blackmer's eyes were focused on the bow of the first schooner. There stood a man waving his arms. Another form in oilskins stood near him.

"They're all safe," encouraged Bill. "We're getting away with it fine. Fire--the wind took us--we lost control. Hold her steady! See--they've got a dinghy in the water--" pointing at the small boat floating beside the big schooner.

"But--but look! Look at that name on her bow! Read it!"

The bow of the schooner ahead was aglow with the red light from the _Mary Chilton_.

"_Mehitable Barnes_," read Bill aloud. "You damned old fool, give me the wheel!"

Captain Bert swung the wheel and held on, even after Bill had pounced on him, bearing him to the deck under his greater strength. Like rivets the captain's fingers clung, Bill clawing at them, tearing at them, to wrench them from their hold. Fire tore through the rigging. The blazing craft heeled to starboard, flames shriveling sails and snapping stays and halyards. Over the heads of the two men struggling at the wheel the crimson curtain spread, swept by the rush of the wind at the quick veering movement of the vessel.

It was sheets of flame and not canvas that carried the schooner on her course out of the shadow of the _Mehitable Barnes_. Men shouted on the _Mehitable's_ bow as the _Mary Chilton_ floundered past. Blistering heat bore down from the blazing mainsail upon the contestants for the wheel, surged up from below, like the ends of fiendish tongs, gripping the two between.

But Captain Bert did not hear the curses of his mate; did not even wince at Bill's nails clawing at his hands that grasped the wheel. All he felt--all he was conscious of--was the swirl of water from the sides of the ungainly _Mary Chilton_ mingled with the crackle and roar from below and overhead--her sluggish departure from the Crosby fleet lying increasingly but slowly astern. And somewhere in the distance that dim gray shore-line of the Herringbone showed faintly through illuminated fog and smoke--it seemed miles and miles away. Then the mainsail descended in a streamer of fire, and the oppressive weight of Bill rolled off his back.

The form of a man groveled at his feet. Captain Bert pulled himself up by the wheel.

"Bill!" he raved. "Bill--you damned scoundrel! I've beaten you! _Beaten you!_ Look astern. Not a schooner of 'em even scorched. Come, Bill--your trick at the wheel now. But you can't turn back. Our canvas is all burnt away. What's left won't hold a paper-bagful of wind."

The captain's face smarted as with the stings of a thousand bees. His eyes--were they burned out? He couldn't really see now. He rather felt the presence of the crumpled mate, roasting on the gridiron of a quarterdeck. Into his arms he gathered the limp body, ran with it, he knew not where. His feet tangled in a line. He fell--and water closed over his head.

Yet was it water? The fire itself had not been so hot. He had scarcely felt the heat of the schooner's blazing wood and mainsail that had encompassed him--but this! It was boiling pitch, scalding him to the marrow. But he clung to the man in his arms, and they bobbed up to the surface together, the captain gasping for breath in the open air.

He knew it was salt water--cold salt water--that scalded his hot flesh. The man he clung to must be dead. It would do him no good even if the captain swam with him to the distant Herringbone. Was it worth while to drag a dead body with him, a body that would hinder his own chances of saving himself? Yes, he must do it. Bill was a scoundrel, but there might be a spark of life in him yet. Even a scoundrel--any human being--was worth saving. It was the law of the sea.

The line binding his leg, he kicked to disengage it. A dark shadow moved in the red light of the water. It was the boat, the dinghy which Bill had left near the companion for their getaway. Clinging to Bill with one hand, he hauled at the line with the other. Finding that he made no progress, he fastened his teeth into Bill's charred shirt and hauled on the line hand over hand. As he suspected, it was fast to the dinghy.

Over the gunwale of the small boat he threw one arm, supporting Bill with the other. To leeward, safely out of the Cowyard, drifted the glowing fragment of the _Mary Chilton's_ hull. But the other light--it was brighter. It illumined the entire wide harbor like day, from the Herringbone to the Howesport waterfront. A yellow light, almost like a big lamp.

The captain's heart sank. He clung grimly to the boat and the limp body, and turned his head toward the Crosby fleet. The _Mehitable Barnes_ was a sheet of leaping, crackling fire from stem to stern!

The captain stared, fascinated. And even while he watched, the flames jumped to the next schooner. The wind caught the fire and swept it in a sheet of gold the length and breadth of the fleet. One after the other, four of the schooners burst into flames. The fifth and sixth, in the path of the cyclone of swirling fire, were already smoking like smoldering logs.

But he--he had a bigger proposition on his hands now than watching a fleet burn up. The inert form he supported wriggled slightly--its mouth breathed, feebly spat out water. If it weren't for Bill he could crawl over the gunwale into the dinghy, run ashore to the Herringbone--but what then? Nothing but the memory of the disaster he had caused by first putting such an idea in Bill's head. He could never look Mehitable in the eyes again. His rivalry with the Crosby Company, the mysterious sailing of the _Mary Chilton_ at night--who would believe his story of Bill's treachery? He could end it all by letting go of the dinghy and sinking--with Bill. Yet Bill was alive. The law of the sea----

But why should he rescue Bill? Bill had deliberately planned and executed the whole disaster; planned it even before the captain had mentioned scuttling the fleet, evidenced by the tar barrels. Why should the _Mary Chilton's_ buyer, a stone carrier, want tar barrels? The captain had done his best to avoid the _Mehitable_--fought for it, almost died for it. It was Bill's doing, the whole outrageous business.

Yet Bill had done it for him. Wrong, to be sure, but still out of a sort of devotion--such devotion as a savage might show to his chief. A fellow who would do that for his skipper was worth saving. Captain Bert gripped the gunwale and Bill with an iron clutch and let the waves and wind do the rest.

He knew that he must be badly burned; that Bill's burns must be even worse. Bill had been buried in the burning mainsail when it fell. Bill had caught it all on his back, thus shielding the captain while they struggled.

There were boats headed from Howesport village to the burning fleet. On the Herringbone the captain made out lights moving back and forth. He wondered whether the men he had glimpsed on the schooner were safe. No doubt the lights on the Herringbone were those men hauling up their boats.

If he could only get Bill into his own boat, get into it himself. It would be so much easier. The strain of holding up a man and clinging to the gunwale at the same time, with that scalding water tingling through every pore of his tender body--it was telling on him. But the Herringbone looked nearer, its illumined shore-line showing white less than a mile away.

A mile! One mile or one hundred miles, Captain Bert knew that his strength was unequal to his task. The man held up by his arm locked with the captain's moaned, and his puffed eyes opened, narrow slits encased in swollen, sooty flesh.

"You--you--I thought--" he gasped. "The Crosby fleet----"

"Never mind them," said the captain tenderly. "We've got a mile to go yet. Take it easy."

"Where is she?"

"Who?"

"The _Mary Chilton_?"

"Oh--her!" disgustedly. "She's all right. So are the Crosby vessels."

"You lie! They're burned--every one of them!" He turned his head with a great effort and looked toward the paling flare of what had been the Crosby fleet.

But Captain Bert was interested in the gray sloop bearing down on them. He needed his strength, even that which he would spend in the effort of speaking.

"Bill," he nevertheless exclaimed, "can't you--grab the gun'le--yourself? My arm--it's about gone. My back----"

Bill groaned and stiffly raised one arm from the water, but it fell back heavily. Captain Bert gritted his teeth and his fingers tightened on the gunwale until it seemed that they must gouge into the wood.

That was what had tired him--holding on to the gunwale. It wasn't Bill's dead weight that exhausted him. It was the resistance of the jerking little boat upon which their lives depended. Either the light of the burning schooners was dimming fast, or the fog was thickening. The water rippling in the glow grew hazy. It was as if they were rising, he and Bill--rising into a cloud. Dizziness--nausea--scalding water, torturing salt water like acid--the onrushing gray sloop expanding to gigantic proportions like an inflating balloon--voices.... He couldn't stand it. His fingers fell from the gunwale, and water closed soothingly over his head.

* * * * *

The fog lifted ... two men were talking. Captain Bert looked into the sharp, pale features of a stranger with a small black mustache. The stranger was bending over him, daubing his chest and arms with grease. The wood the captain was lying on was the quarterdeck of Captain Ed Pierce's sloop, and Captain Ed stood nearby at the wheel.

Captain Bert felt cool. He smelt camphor. And the gladdening thought that he was not seriously burned was checked by the sight of a heap of canvas lying at his side.

"Bill!" he spoke in a far-away voice. "Where's Bill?"

But he knew well enough that the canvas hid what had been Bill.

"But why torment him? Cap'n Bert never done it," declared Captain Ed. "I've known him since we was boys----"

The stranger checked him, and addressing Captain Bert, asked, "Why did you burn the Crosby fleet?" The abruptness of the question brought Captain Bert to his senses.

"I ain't so sure I did," he replied.

"But your schooner was afire. It ran into them----"

"That's a lie!" insisted Captain Bert. "If my schooner had rammed one of the fleet, how come it she fetched up to the east'ard of the Cowyard? A burnin' schooner that rams a vessel ain't likely to recover herself and make a half-turn against the wind."

"By gum, that's right!" agreed Captain Ed. "I told ye Bert never done it----"

"And the light--did ye notice?" Captain Bert went on. "'Twas yellow and the _Mary's_ was red. The _Mehitable_ never caught fire from the _Mary_. She was set afire from the inside. Part of that yellow light was kerosene."

The stranger looked at Captain Ed and smiled.

"I admit the idea of scuttlin' the fleet come to me," Captain Bert went on, "but I never sanctioned Bill to set the _Mary_ afire. He done it without my knowin'. Said he'd got a customer for the old hulk in Gloucester--got me to sail there with her tonight."

"A fake trip," put in Captain Ed. The stranger held up a hand to restrain him.

"I fought for the wheel when he set the _Mary_ afire--and I got it. I sheered the _Mary_ off from the fleet, and 'twas while Bill and me fought for the wheel that the mains'l fell blazin' on Bill--and I done my best to save him----"

"It was that burn on his back that killed Bill," Captain Ed explained. "Mr. Clyde, as a friend of Cap'n Bert's, I forbid ye to tantalize him any longer."

"I'm accepting your orders," smiled the stranger. "Cap'n Blackmer, don't think we're blind to what you did. We were trailing the _Mary Chilton_ in the fog. We saw everything that happened."

"You trailed us!"

"We've suspected it all along. The Crosby Company had sunk too much money in its fleet."

"That's what Bill told me." Captain Bert's eyes were wide.

"The Crosby Company was left bankrupt with a fleet it could not get rid of, although they succeeded in keeping the news from getting out. It had no capital to operate such a fleet with, but the vessels were insured up to the last dollar of their value."

"Tell him about Bill," interposed Captain Ed.

"Wait." And to Captain Bert again, "The Brisfield Insurance Company sent me as its inspector to keep the fleet under observation while it was in this harbor. Cap'n Pierce is a stockholder in the insurance company. So as soon as I got here--about an hour or so ago on the night train from Boston--I looked him up."

"I'd be in consider'ble money if ye'd come an hour or so sooner," commented Captain Ed. "But go on."

"Cap'n Ed said you were starting for Gloucester in an old hulk you'd discarded--with a new mate--and we agreed it looked suspicious. So we trailed you in his sloop."

Captain Bert sat bolt upright.

"We stayed to wind'ard of the Crosby fleet to make observations," Mr. Clyde went on. "That's why we didn't pick you up earlier. The last we saw of you and Bill, you were fighting for the wheel with fire all around you. We had to get complete evidence that the Crosby fleet was set afire from the inside of the _Mehitable_."

"Tell him about--" insisted Captain Ed.

"Oh yes--Bill." The stranger paused and glanced at the form shrouded with canvas. "Well, Bill was Crosby's professional crook who did all his dirty work for him. You see, Crosby has done this sort of thing before--got up companies, failed, and usually ended by collecting full insurance after his establishment had burned up. This is his first marine venture. All his others were in business ashore. But we got inside information on his past record--and Bill's--that opened our eyes."

"Then Bill was workin' for him--and against me--all the time?"

"Using you for the goat, to lay the burning of the fleet on to you," said Mr. Clyde. "Bill got his just reward tonight."

"And how about the insurance?" Captain Bert's voice was husky.

"Not a cent will be paid. We saw the _Mehitable_ set on fire from her foc'sle when the Mary sheered off from her. We saw the escape of the men who did it. Our next step will be to get the goods on Crosby himself."

"But the Widder Barnes--all her money is tied up in the Crosby Company," protested Captain Bert.

"Don't worry about her," exploded Captain Ed. "It's me who's stung--not her. I bought all her shares in the Crosby Company after I left you this afternoon."

"Godfrey!"

"Serves me right, too, for judgin' the strength of that Crosby Company by the show their fleet made in the harbor. That ill wind of yourn sorter shifted, Bert, and left me becalmed.

"But you, Bert," he added with determination, "you pop the question to the widder as soon as your feet hit dry land. Say, she'd 'a' given me that Crosby stock free gratis if I hadn't had a two-thousand-dollar check all made out to her in my hand. With her luck and your judgment, you'll form a team that will make you a packet admiral yet!"

HENRY HORNBONE'S ONE-MAN WAR

BY HELEN TOPPING MILLER

_Author of "White Collar Stuff," "Pitch," etc._

PREJUDICES OF THE OLD-TIMERS DIE HARD. BUT A RAILROAD IS A POWERFUL THING FOR ONE OLD-TIMER TO FIGHT--AND WHEN OTHERS ENTER THE FEUD, THINGS BEGIN TO LOOK DIFFERENT

In his sooty kitchen with the coal oil lamp sending a plume of smoke aloft and four kittens rolling under the three-legged stove, Henry Hornbone sat and went through the motions of a man eating his supper.

He fished sausages out of a skillet, he cut them carefully into small bits, he smeared oleomargarine on thick slabs of baker's bread and he stirred sugar into his tea, one spoonful after another, but he did not eat.

Henry was listening. His ears were listening, straining till he could almost see them standing out batlike from his knobby old head. His whole gaunt ridiculous body was listening, and his soul, such cramped and curious sort of soul as he owned, stood stock still in a cold tremor of mingled triumph and dread.

Henry was listening for the wreck of the Oriole Limited.

While he spooned sugar into his cup, staring off into the blackness with a sort of fascinated paralysis, he was waiting for the hideous crashing, the roar and rending, the sickening upheaval, the booming rush of steam when the proud steel train should go hurtling into the frozen muck of his turnip patch. Inch by inch past block after block, he followed the Oriole Limited in his mind through the black night to her doom. Now she would be streaking through Hodges Siding; a great whooping serpent with a thousand gleaming eyes and a tongue of flame.

He took out his old silver watch, calculated the difference between sun time and railroad time--speculated. Four minutes out of Hodges now--eight minutes more. Eight minutes, and he would be even with the B. & A.!

Nothing on earth could save the Oriole Limited. Henry had fixed everything himself. He had turned the abandoned old switch that in the past had served the guano factory and spiked it himself. To be certain that nothing could prevent the destruction he planned he had put two heavy plow beams on the rails near the switch frogs and had weighted them down with rocks and brickbats. All this after dark and so near to train time that there was small chance for a prowling section hand to discover his work.

It had taken Henry eighteen years to accumulate courage enough to spike that switch. Half his queer, isolated life had been devoted to a lonely vendetta against the B. & A.--a one-man war which no one beside himself suspected. Sixteen years since, when the spur to the guano plant was first laid, Henry had made a wedge of steel, long and sharp. Twelve years later, when the factory had yielded its malodorous ghost and its red tin roof began to sag and the old spur track to rust, he had begun a long series of abortive and secret attempts at train wrecking.

Every dark and rainy night for years he had crept out through his pie-plant row and past his humming beehives, slipped over the white fence and spiked the switch open with a few quick, practised strokes. But always about the time the Oriole Limited pulled out of Hodges Siding his courage had failed him, and he had rushed out with mallet and sledge to remove the menace he had created.

Whenever a work train pulled into Elsie, Henry always suffered a cold apprehension for fear the useless old spur would be torn up before he had screwed up enough nerve to do his work of sabotage. But for some reason the grass-grown length of abandoned spur remained. And now the switch was open, grimly spiked, waiting for the arrogant engine of the Limited to come crashing, amazed, to her tragedy.

Six minutes!

Henry tasted his tea. It was syrupy and nauseous. He spat it out nervously, turned his eyes toward the black window and wrested them away again by main force. He had purposely locked the door and hidden the key in a sack of nails and bolts where it would take half an hour to find it. The front door was locked fast also; indeed the front door had been locked fast for so many years that it was doubtful if the rusty old lock would turn at all.

He had taken off his shoes, carried them deliberately to the attic and hung them over the rafters. Every precaution against a last-minute sagging of his nerve had been taken. He had even dropped the sledge hammer in the cistern, half to guard against his own weakness and half as alibi. The wreck, he had decided, would be laid to train robbers who had been operating on the B. & A. at frequent intervals. Nobody would suspect old Henry Hornbone who fathered every deserted cat for miles around and sat always on the front seat at prayer meeting with his useless ear trumpet slung around his shoulder on a buckskin cord; because nobody ever had suspected him though he had carried on his one-man war against the road for eighteen years.

No one, not even the B. & A. officials themselves, were aware that a state of hostilities had existed between Henry and the road since the first surveyors had come dragging their numbered stakes through his little peach orchard. A few engineers had laughed when they saw the absurd old fellow in his flapping clothes standing beside the new roadbed brandishing angry fists. But when, not long since, a trio of gondolas had broken loose from a slow-crawling freight and gone bumping joyfully down to the station where they crashed through fifty feet of platform, demolished a dozen telegraph poles and a water crane, nobody so much as thought of old Henry. Henry's very appearance was an alibi. He looked like a motherless child, grown to man's stature, grizzled, bewildered, eagerly friendly.

Since his boyhood Henry had been stone deaf. Such fragments of speech as remained to him, made timorous by the vast closing in of silence, were uttered in a shrill yell which the unthinking and strangers assumed to be the babbling of a moron. The amused pity with which his attempts at conversation were received had not escaped Henry's sharp eyes, and he had grown to depend more and more upon his grin as a means of communication with the world, and upon a jerky code of signs and syllables.

No one would have believed that grisly plots were hatched behind the glow of that ingenuous grin. No one in Elsie, he knew, would ever suspect that the sharpened wedge and the plow beams were the work of a simple, grinning old mute. He was safe enough if he could just sit still.

Four minutes!

In four minutes he would be revenged for the invading of his little plot of ground, which his mother had left to him, by men who had cursed him and by steel rails and yelping engines. In four minutes he would have been paid for the dazed wretchedness which had been his when men with law at their backs had come and gabbled things which he could neither hear nor comprehend, but which, it appeared, gave to the B. & A. the little earth he had tended, gave them the right to shower his roof with hot cinders, to slay his quince bushes with sulphurous smoke, to rattle his puttyless window panes loose with the thunder of locomotives.

Four minutes! He held his elbows in a grip that hurt. He twisted his old legs about each other till they ached. His face, with its three-day growth of sandy beard, writhed and twitched. But he sat still.

Coming! Coming! He felt the first premonitory shudder of his floor sills that told him the train had crossed the bridge below the yards. Every pulse in him spun as though a gigantic current galvanized him. His head roared. His chest hurt.

Nearer! Almost here! His grip held. His body grew numb.

Then something snapped. Some grim gripping gave way. He went limp. He retched. He was old Henry Hornbone again, simple, kindly old Henry who mothered cats.

He went through the window kicking the sash to flinders. Shoeless he leaped like a wild old warlock through his garden, over the fence, up to the right of way. The headlight of the Oriole Limited flared upon him--a dancing ghost with waving arms--as the train came to a grinding stop thirty feet from the spiked switch and the plow beams.

Charlie Sanders, who ran the Limited, sprang out of the cab. Newt Murphy, the conductor, sprinted down the cinders. To them old Henry waved wild hands and cackled unintelligible things. The flag-man, an officious person, thudded ahead and discovered the open switch.

"By George, old Henry sure saved all our lives," Charlie Sanders explained to the passengers who came swarming up. "Looka that--the way we was running old Fifteen-eighty would have turned plumb end over end when she hit that spur."

Henry Hornbone found himself the center of a crowd, and a hero. Men shook his hand, women's cold, shaking fingers clapped his own. They shouted questions at him till Newt Murphy came to his relief.

"He's deef--can't hear a thing, Henry can't. Harmless old guy, but stone deef."

Someone was moving through the crowd gathering up money, a girl with red hair and a little gray hat tipped over one eye. She brought the donation to Henry in her cupped hands--little hands--bills and silver dollars and a few quarters and halves.

"Take it," she urged, "it's for you."

Henry backed away. All his life he had been terrified in the presence of women.

"He can't hear you, lady," explained Charlie Sanders.

"Oh--make him understand, somebody." The girl followed Henry with her double handful of currency, but he backed further, sidling, his lips lifted at the corners.

He was in a cold agony, a wretchedness of shaking relief and anguish of conscience. He wanted to be let alone. He wanted to creep into his old bed under the wool quilts, deep down where he could shut his ears against the penetrating jeers that clanged like sleighbells in his brain. The girl's insistence drew from him a painful burst of his rare, dreadful speech.

"I don't want any money!" he shrilled. Then, snatching away from them, he leaped the fence and tore through his tiny back garden. Inside his house he jerked the blinds shut over the outraged window and sagged down in a chair, shaking from head to foot.

"Now," he thought gloomily, "now--they'll tear up that spur. Now what you goin' to do, Henry Hornbone? You're a dad-blamed old fool."

But something seemed to warm him as he crept half-clothed into his bed.

"Gosh, that girl had little hands," he thought aloud. "Might 'a' killed her anyway. Might 'a' killed a lot of folks. Didn't kill 'em though. Didn't kill anybody."

The visitor who banged on Henry's old warped front door in the morning grew weary after a while and went around to the back. The knock on the back door meant nothing to Henry's sealed ears, but the jar came presently to his senses and he opened the closed shutters and thrust out his head. The grin was absent from his grizzled face. He glowered. He scowled till he saw that the intruder upon his doorstep was feminine and young, that she had red hair and little hands and feet that looked as though dancing were their chief mission in life. Then he grinned.

"Key's lost," he yelled suddenly, so that the girl jumped. "Can't git in."

She nodded and smiled. The smile and her dancing eyes and the glow of her hair were a combination as dazzling as winter sunshine. She had manifestly come prepared. She pulled a little pad and pencil from her pocket and wrote rapidly.

"Can you read?"

The furious disgust in Henry's eyes was answer enough. She thought him a plumb fool then!

"Sure, I can read," he shouted. "I ain't crazy. I'm just hard of hearing."

Eager apology was in her smile. She scribbled rapidly.

"You are a brave man," Henry read. "You saved the lives of eighty-four people."

He shook his head. "I ain't brave. I'm just an old fool."

She laughed at this, and it was as if the sun leaped up with a shout and a lot of nymphs and dryads and other ladies in diaphanous veils whirled in a mad dance on a hilltop.

"I am the new operator at Elsie." ran her next missive. "I have a pass for you from the president of the road. You can ride anywhere you want any time you like."

"Don't want to ride," grumbled Henry. "Don't want to go no place. Don't want nothing to do with your railroad--no time."

He remembered then that he had neglected to put on his outer shirt and that his red flannel undergarment was informal even for morning wear. So he pulled in his head like a sulky old turtle.

"Don't want nothing to do with your railroad," he repeated. "Never. No time!"

He clapped the shutters fast and locked them with a wooden pin. Presently he felt the pattering passage of her heels on the porch. She was going off and leaving him alone. Let 'em all go off and leave him alone.

He dressed slowly, climbing to the cold attic for his shoes. From the mail sack he rummaged the key and opened the back door. As it swung back, shrieking, a dozen vari-colored cats suddenly appeared from different places of waiting and streaked eagerly into the house. Henry clumped back, sopped bread in the sausage grease, congealed from the night before, soaked it in sweetened tea and set out half a dozen plates which instantly became the centers for a petal-like array of flashing pink tongues.

Then he trudged through the brief strip of garden left to him, tossed a handful of corn to a charging troup of guineas, and arrived at the fence. Down the track he could see a line of blue-clad laborers. The lift of their sledges and their flashing fall came to him soundlessly. They were tearing up the old spur.

He swung a leg over the fence and tramped on to the village, nodding to people whom he met. Women smiled at him, men gave him friendly nods. He was a personage. He had saved the Limited from a wreck. Something which survived in Henry's queer, cramped old soul laughed aloud. He was safe. Nobody in Elsie would suspect him. His war could go on. But now he would have to think of something new--now that they were tearing up the spur. He felt lost and empty. For eighteen years he had comforted the thwarted vindictiveness in him with plans for that colossal wreck. Now it was all ended. Days of toil which had gone into the sharpening of that wedge were wasted. Nobody had been killed though. That was something. He had never thought much about the people being killed. He was glad that there were no awful bloody bodies lying around in Elsie. Henry hated blood. He kept his chickens till they died of old age because he could not slay them.

At the station he surveyed the new length of platform with grim satisfaction. He had made the B. & A. a little trouble, anyway--paid them back a trifle for the outraging of his bit of garden. He tramped across the new planks marked the oozing pitch and the shining nail heads with the avidness of lonely people for inconsequential things. Then he felt eyes on his back. Deafness had made him supersensitive. He turned quickly, and in the window of the little bay where the telegraph instruments lurked under the green light, he saw the girl--the red-headed girl.

She was smiling at him. Something in Henry's twisted old nature warmed and thrilled. Women smiled at him often, the same smile they gave to lame dogs or harmless half-wits. But the girl's eyes were different. They held a frank friendliness which had no pity or evasion in it. She waved a hand at him. She was bending over a table and her hair was bound down by the elastic of a green eye-shade.

A freight pulled in then, and Henry moved off sullenly. But in the afternoon he came shambling back, a votive offering in his pocket. Grinning diffidently he laid this gift on the window sill, soothing its protests with swift, stubby old fingers--a yellow kitten with rascally circles of black about its eyes, a comical clown of a kitten which until this hour had been the cherished member of Henry's huge feline family.

"This here one's yours," he yelled, as the girl came hurrying to the window. "If he gets the fits you lemme know and I'll fetch you some catnip."

And he turned and sped away, his shoulders hunched, without a backward look.

Began for old Henry Hornbone an amazing friendship.

Every morning he shambled down to the station at Elsie with some sort of a present in his pocket. Sometimes it was a speckled guinea egg, warm from the nest. Sometimes a brown twig softly threaded with new pussy willows, and as spring warmed and the frost went out of the land he brought little wild strawberry blooms like gold beaded stars, now a single violet, once a white snail shell scoured to brilliance. And at dusk, when the night trick came on, the girl operator, whose name was Mary Hill, came often to the old house beside the track. Sometimes she carried a paper bag warm and greasy with hot doughnuts. Sometimes her offering was a piece of kidney for the cats. Often she brought only her smile, which became the one bit of glow in old Henry's drab, baffled existence.

She mended his socks, she impelled him by her frowns to scour his floors, to shave every day in his eagerness to please, to keep the cats off the table and his boots off his bed. He even bought a black necktie and a new hat to replace the greasy old relic which had served him for twenty years. Mary Hill, with her red head and her dancing eyes, which penetrated the frozen barrier of the silence which had so long kept the old man in desolate isolation, became to him a little of the mother that he missed and something of the daughter he had never had. There were people in Elsie who laughed. There were young men at Mary Hill's boarding-house who teased her about old Henry Hornbone. But most people understood. And Henry, toiling to make a cherry tree bloom beside the fence, forgot in his present content, his vengeful war on the B. & A.

And then came the strike.

To Henry the strike meant little. He sensed a little of it, through the things that he read in the badly printed weekly paper at Elsie, he understood the guards who tramped up and down the right of way warning him back whenever he threw a leg over the fence. But as the trouble grew more tense, as bridges went up in horrific explosions, as trains were wrecked mysteriously and engineers intimidated, Henry saw the strain of it reflected in the harassed eyes of Mary Hill. There was a young marine in the station now, whenever he tramped down in the mornings--a cocky youth with dark eyes and a proud scowl.

A day or two after that, Henry bought a heavy calibered revolver from the black-smith. That night he nailed a tobacco can on his woodshed, and when Mary Hill came by, he haled her in and made her practise shooting at the can till she could hit it three times out of six--till the palm of her hand was blistered by the heavy stock.

"They blew the bridge at Alapaha last night," she told him, as he rubbed melted resin on the blisters. Henry could understand much that she said by this time, if she spoke slowly and distinctly. He nodded.

"You keep this here and use it," he ordered, oiling the cylinder and loading it deftly. "Gun ain't no good if you're scart of it. And if that soldier down there gives you any sass you pop him over, too. I don't like the look of him, no time--he's too blame' smart."

A slow color crept over Mary Hill's face at this, and with it a crawling chill was communicated to old Henry's heart. There was a rift--tiny, almost imperceptible, yet appalling to the lonely old man to whom the friendship of this girl had come to be such a tremendous thing. Her eyes avoided his for an instant, then the dancing laughter came into them again. She laid the grim gun down on the back steps and snatched at the old man's hand. Henry knew what she wanted--to see that cherry tree. She had bought it for him from a fruit tree peddler and they had watched the opening of every bud. It ought to be in bloom today--every flower open. They hurried past the pie-plant row and the humming beehives. At the fence old Henry Hornbone halted, aghast. He wavered a bit, and then black, militant wrath darkened his face.

The little cherry tree was bent sideways, half stripped of its bark, wilted, trampled. And beside it, driven grimly into the ground was a very new white post, very blatantly lettered in black--"B. & A. RAILROAD. RIGHT OF WAY."

Henry had not sworn an oath since his closing ears had shut from him the sound of his own voice. But now he swore, shrilly, horribly. He sprang at the white post, wrenching and tugging at it, but it had been sledged into the soil by strong men. It did not budge a fraction. The girl's face was a pained mask of wretchedness. She had known that they were condemning a new right of way; that eventually, when the menace of the strike was removed, that the division was to be double-tracked, but she had not thought that it would mean this--the destruction of an old man's pitiful little interest, the ruthless slaughtering of the few simple things that made up life to old Henry, who was denied so much of life.

"Oh--shame! Shame!" she cried aloud. But old Henry did not hear. He was fairly dancing in his rage, he shook his fist at the blinking lines of track, he breathed dreadful threats. War was on again--relentless war against the B. & A. He hardly saw Mary Hill. He scarcely knew when she went away. He was busy with mallet and sledge battering that intruding post out of the ground. By dark he had loosened it and flung it over the fence on the right of way. And next morning he did not go down to the station. He worked doggedly all day, building a high barrier of barbed wire across the back of his place.

The road's lawyer battered at his front door in vain. The postman brought a letter containing a condemnation notice and a check, but the letter lay under the front door for three days before Henry found it. Then he dropped it in the kitchen stove without opening it, and renewed his grim vendetta.

The night the bridge at Hodges was destroyed he felt a gleeful satisfaction, as though he himself had planted the charge under the pillars. He tramped out to the wrecked bridge in the morning, avoiding the right of way cannily, gloating over every twisted rail and fallen cross-tie, grinning his grin which had taken on a warped and sinister grimness. When he came back the fence he had built so laboriously was down, flung carelessly over the beehives and against the shed. In his garden--what little the road had left to him--stood a tall, narrow, yellow building.

It was a block signal tower--two stories high, flashing red and green target lights from its gables, looped about with wires, with glass windows and a locked door and about its base a wide area of piled cinders.

There was a tower like it at Hodges--but here--here in his garden! Henry stared at it in incredible amazement, made numb by baffled wrath. There was a light in the top of the yellow tower, which had manifestly been built intact elsewhere, and set down on his ground by a maintenance crew. At the bottom, slumped on the threshold, smoking a cigarette, bulked the young guard whom he had seen in the station at Elsie--the sleek-haired, insolent lad who had brought a shy, warm blush into Mary Hill's face.

As Henry approached, this young soldier motioned him away, jauntily, with the butt of an Army Colt. Henry burst into a shrill, cackling invective. The young soldier laughed. Henry retreated, presently, a long procession of cats trailing after. But for once he was too troubled, too tremulous with fury to heed the purring friendliness of his yellow-eyed family. The cats lingered in astonishment, but Henry, sagged forward on his doorstep, his eyes fixed on that tall, sulphur-hued intruder with the red and green eye in his garden, paid no attention to them. For once a pampered tribe of feline pensioners went supperless, offended and aloof.

Half the night, while the spring frogs came out and fiddled and the switch-engines hooted up and down, unheard, Henry Hornbone sat at his back door smoldering. Then a reckless idea leaped at him out of the dark, making his slow blood tingle by its very audacity. The sight of the switch engine, panting idly like a fat old hippopotamus with one eye, on the siding beyond his outraged fence inspired a wild scheme for vengeance which drove every vestige of sleep from his tired brain.

"I'll learn 'em," he said aloud. "I'll learn 'em so they'll stay learnt! I got to get me a chain. I got to have a long chain and a wire cable. And I've got to get that feller away from there. I've got to--if I have to knock him in the head."

He remembered then where he had seen a tangled length of cable--down at Hodges where the bridge had been destroyed. It would be risky business getting it; there would be guards and they were touchy and apt to shoot. But somehow he'd work it. A stout wire cable, fastened swiftly around that block tower, a chain reaching to the tender of the switch engine--and the B. & A. would move that offending building from his land themselves!

It was a wild, fantastic plan, but the very difficulties it involved served to rouse old Henry from his lethargy of shocked rage. He pulled his hat low over his ears and slipped out the front way, following the right of way toward Hodges. He knew where the cable lay, tangled in the bottom of a ravine, where it was dark and propitious. Getting the young soldier away from the tower would be the problem. Henry considered various expedients, from setting his own house on fire to cold-blooded murder. He neared the scene of the wreck, where he could see the dangling ruin of the bridge bristling like a ship with lanterns. He could feel the down thud of hammers, as the hastily drafted maintenance crews attacked the wreckage. He crept close through a damp tangle of last year's grass, and it was then that he discovered the two men who, like himself approached cautiously. They kept just ahead of him, heads down, bodies low in the weeds.

He crawled after them, keeping back out of hearing, watching in the darkness to discover what they were up to. Strikers, he decided, since his over sensitive nose brought him no evidence that they were common, unwashed hoboes. They smelled clean--like tobacco and soap. A bit greasy, but without offense. Henry wriggled through the dry grass on their trail. They were making for a tool chest, set beside the track, he noted, and one of them presently stood boldly upright, walked to the chest, lifted something out of it, walked casually toward a group working about a flare, while the other waited, hidden.

In a few minutes the first marauder came sliding back, prone, and Henry lifted his head to see what it was they had pilfered. From the gingerly way they handled it, the caution with which they wormed back to the road, he knew--dynamite!

Forgetting his own errand, avid with childish curiosity, he followed the pair, keeping always out of sight, trailing them back to Elsie--back to his own street, back to his own house!

And here an amazing melodrama was enacted before his staring eyes, almost before he could think. He saw the sinister two slink through his garden, saw them hurl themselves upon the young guard, beheld a waving chaos of arms and legs, heard a thrown pistol clink upon the cinders--heard with his tense nerves and his straining faculties, though his sealed ears denied him tidings of the fight. Then he saw that one of the strikers held the guard prone, and that the other was burrowing swiftly under the yellow tower. It was at that moment that Henry saw another sight which turned him cold and numb and made him forget every grievance he had ever known against the B. & A. He saw a glint of red hair at the upper window of that block tower. He saw Mary Hill standing there--her body poised in terror. In one hand she held the pistol he had given her. In the other she clutched a frightened yellow kitten.

Like a wild old warlock Henry Hornbone hurled himself into the mélée. The dynamiters were strong men; they were desperate and they were armed with deadly brass knuckles and coupling pins. But Henry was armed with primitive rage, which goes a long way in a pitched battle. His head was barked, a fist had crashed into his teeth, a knee had found his stomach and he was feeling a strange lightness in his head--a sort of airiness which persisted in lifting him into the ether, persisted in weakening the dogged grip he had on a tough, whiskery neck. He felt himself giving in; he rallied and snatched great, aching breaths into his bursting lungs, pounding monotonously on a confusion of struggling legs with his stout old hobnailed boots, when he realized that another force had entered into the fray. A red-headed harpy, screaming and dancing, brandishing a big black pistol was circling the fight, dragging at the vindictive person who was endeavoring to choke the young soldier's breath out, battering futile fists upon unfeeling backs, sobbing in impotent wrath.

It was then that Henry dragged out of the tortured thinness of his throat a terrible, curdling scream.

"Bean him!" he yodeled, the yell cutting the air like a knife, "Bean both of 'em--with the gun."

And Mary Hill obeyed.

She beaned both of them with such efficiency that when the young soldier had struggled up and spit out his broken teeth and righted his outrageously disarranged apparel and found his gun, the whiskery pair of malcontents were still sprawled, unconsciously content, in the damp gloom of Henry's pie-plant row.

Henry himself sat up, conscious that certain very vital localities on his person had been woefully maltreated, sure that he would never be able to get a whole breath again, and if by chance he did, it would sure jolt his tortured ribs loose. But he grinned. The grin was jagged and a bit gory, but it persisted. And Mary Hill gave him a wavery, slightly tremulous smile. She still held the pistol, but Henry saw with admiration that she held it muzzle down, harmless but ready. She was a good one! And she might have been killed--blown to pieces like those ragged cross ties at Hodges! Henry struggled up.

"You better fetch somebody," he shouted at the young soldier, who was still a trifle bewildered. "You better fetch a gang to look after them two. I'll stay here till you get back."

The guard departed, having first carefully tied the dynamiters with Henry's clothesline. Mary Hill sat down beside Henry, the big gun balanced on her knee. Her cold, small fingers crept into his palm. She was little and dear, she might have been the mother that he missed or the daughter he had never had. The old man patted her wrist gently and a slow ache swelled within him, made up of loneliness and weariness. Then a new thought comforted him. She'd be there every day--in that tower, in his garden, the green eye-shade binding down her rebellious hair. He gave a tremendous sigh and his age-old war against the B. & A. perished in lusty middle age.

At this minute two-thirds of the village of Elsie surged into his garden.

Henry shambled up, jerked his suspenders straight, hunted his hat. Men were crowding round him--he saw mouths moving excitedly, hands waving. They beat him on the back, they shook his hand. But Henry pulled away.

"Lemme alone," he yelled at the curious who milled about him. "You lemme alone. I've gotta feed my cats!"

GRAINS SEND ROOTS MANY FEET INTO EARTH

Investigators for the Carnegie Institution of Washington have reported some interesting discoveries about the depth to which food plants send their roots. Trees and other perennials send tap-roots to a great distance into the earth, but that cereals, which start new from the seed each season, do the same, has not been generally understood. Professor John E. Weaver reports that in Nebraska wheat and oats were found to send roots down to a depth of from six to eight feet, while corn roots were found eight feet deep. New agricultural methods may result from these investigations.

HELICOPTERS MAY MAKE AIRPLANES OBSOLETE

The next big forward step in aviation will be the helicopter. Run to your Greek dictionary and look it up. "Helicon" means spiral or screw and "pteron" means wing. Get it? Orville Wright invented the word and predicted years ago that someone would invent the machine. An airplane--though it wouldn't be a "plane" at all and we'd have to call it a "flying machine" or something like that--which was able to rise into the air by means of "screw-wings" or devices like electric fans placed horizontally, could ascend from a space no bigger than the spread of its wings, and descend, if the machinery worked properly, in a similar space. Instead of a big landing field away out in the country, such machines could start out from a city roof or a suburban back yard. Both the British and the French governments, which pay much more attention to aviation than does ours, have offered prizes for helicopters capable of doing certain "stunts." The British specifications call for a machine that will rise 2,000 feet, carrying a pilot and fuel for an hour's flight; hover stationary in the air for half an hour, and fly horizontally at 60 miles an hour. Louis Brennan, the monorail inventor, claims to have built a machine covering these requirements. Pescara, an Argentine inventor, made a helicopter that would rise six feet carrying a passenger, and sold it to the French government.

FROM ONE TO ANOTHER

BY EARL C. McCAIN

_Author of "Desert Justice," etc._

THE PONY EXPRESS IS NO MORE; BUT THE WEST STILL PRODUCES HORSES OF THAT NEVER-DIE BREED, AND MEN WHO DO NOT KNOW WHEN TO QUIT. HENCE THIS RACE OVER THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL HAS ALL THE THRILLS OF THE OLD DAYS--AND A FEW NEW ONES

John Dillon's first knowledge of the Pony Express Relay Race had come from reading the newspapers. It was to be held in celebration of the old Pony Express, and the horses taking part in it would follow the old Santa Fe Trail from St. Joseph, Mo., to Santa Fe, N. M., a distance of approximately eight hundred miles.

While the race was to be run by picked relay teams of horses, the real rivalry would be between the five big express companies, which had, in a way, sprung from the old Pony Express when it had been succeeded by the more modern methods of handling express and mail. Each of the express companies was organizing a team, and the honor of winning would go to the team that first delivered a registered package of express at Santa Fe.

The entire country was interested in the race, not only because of the traditions connected with the Pony Express, but because it was a sporting event of a different type. Dillon's interest was deeper than that. He was the owner of Sagamore, a magnificent black stallion that had already won fame as a long distance runner, and he had been expecting an offer to enter his horse in one of the teams ever since the race had been announced.

The day before he had received a telegram from John P. Hammond, president of the Dell-Argo Express Company, and he had come in from his foothill ranch to meet Hammond at the Brown hotel in Denver.

A casual observer, watching the two men as they shook hands in the hotel lobby, would probably have been struck by the similarity between them--even though they represented vastly different spheres of life. Hammond was the typical man of big business, well-groomed and modestly attired, his appearance even more distinguished by a faint tinge of gray in his hair.

Dillon was no larger than Hammond, yet he possessed the same marks of character strength. His weight would have been guessed at one hundred and forty pounds, and his eyes were steel-blue and sharp, surrounded by fine wrinkles--something that distinguishes the man who has lived on the sage-dotted mesas or the desert. The movement of his lithe body, as he stepped forward to meet Hammond, marked him as a man accustomed to a life in the saddle.

As might have been expected, Hammond came straight to the point.

"I represent the Dell-Argo Express Company, Mr. Dillon," he began, "and we are particularly anxious to win this race because our company was really the pioneer express company of the West. I understand you have a great horse, and my purpose in coming here is to offer you five thousand dollars to handle the Dell-Argo team and enter your own horse. The company will pay all expenses, and in addition, you will have a chance at the five thousand dollar purse."

"What other horses have you?"

"None, at this time. That will be in your hands. It is only fair to tell you that you may have trouble securing suitable horses for the race. Dan Mortley, who, I understand, bore a shady reputation in racing circles before he was made a superintendent of the Continental Express Company through the influence of a wealthy uncle, is managing their team. I'm sure that the Continental company wouldn't permit any crookedness in the race if they knew of it, but they're letting Mortley handle their team because he understands horse-racing, and are allowing him plenty of money. Frankly, I think Mortley intends to win by fair or foul means. He has already prevented us from getting several horses we wanted."

"How about the other express companies?"

"Oh, they will have teams entered, but it is generally believed that Mortley's team will make a walk-away of the race, since he already has engaged many of the best endurance runners in the country. Do you happen to know of any other horses that you can get?"

"Yes, two," Dillon stated, then with a smile added, "and that reminds me that I had better accept your offer at once."

"Good," Hammond replied. "I'll leave for St. Joseph tonight, to complete arrangements, and to secure some more horses for you. Get those two you mentioned, and better ship them as soon as possible. The race is to begin Thursday morning, April 3, the anniversary of the first trip of the Pony Express."

They discussed plans a few minutes longer, then with a Dell-Argo check for one thousand dollars in his pocket, Dillon left Hammond and hurried out to send a telegram.

Dillon had tried not to appear eager when accepting Hammond's offer and check, but the truth was that he was elated. For the first time in his life he was seriously in need of money and the offer had come at an opportune time.

A few months before he had happened upon what seemed a splendid buy on a herd of cattle--one so good that in order to close the deal he had mortgaged his ranch for ten thousand dollars. He had considered himself lucky in getting the cattle at such a price, and had planned on borrowing enough money on the herd to take up the note when it became due. Then had come a sudden epidemic of the foot and mouth disease that had wiped out most of his herd, and caused the Government agents to kill the remainder to prevent the disease from spreading.

Dillon had expected no trouble in renewing his mortgage when that came due, but to his surprise, the bank had refused this. In a final effort to save his ranch, Dillon had been forced to give another mortgage on his most valued possession--Sagamore. Two more efforts to raise money had failed, and now, unless he could take up the mortgage on Sagamore when it fell due, he would lose the horse. Under the circumstances, Hammond's offer was providential.

In telling Hammond that he knew of two horses for his team, Dillon's first thought had been of Patsy, a game little cow-horse that had raced Sagamore to the very finish in a former race. Patsy was owned by Laramie Jones, at Laramie, Wyoming, and Dillon sent a wire to Jones a few minutes after accepting Hammond's offer.

The second horse was Imperator, a great white stallion owned by Gus Workland, of Denver, and Dillon made a prompt visit to the Workland stables. Imperator was getting old, but he was dead game, and he had the ability to hold a good speed for a long distance. Dillon lost no time in making arrangements with Workland to ship the horse in plenty of time for the race.

Early the next morning Dillon received an answer to his wire to Jones, accepting his offer for the little cow-horse. Satisfied with the start he had made in gathering a team, Dillon returned to his ranch that noon. The following day he loaded Sagamore into the express car that was to take them to St. Joseph.

Hammond met Dillon and his horse upon their arrival in the city where the race was to start, but he brought disappointing news. In spite of his efforts, he had secured only two horses. One of these was Speedaway--one of the fastest horses of the year--but the other, a big bay called Pathfinder, was a horse that Dillon knew well. The bay horse could run for a time, but he simply lacked the endurance to match his courage in a long race.

"I have wired or seen at least twenty owners," Hammond stated, "but Mortley has beaten us to most of them. Besides the horses he intends to use, he has taken options on most of the other horses that would be suitable for this race."

Dillon nodded quietly, and Hammond, in a more optimistic tone, went on, "We'll have a chance, however, even with only five horses. The Continental is the only company that will have more than ten horses in their string, and the rest of the express companies have made arrangements with the railroads to move the horses and riders along the route as they finish each lap of the race."

Dillon couldn't exactly share Hammond's enthusiasm. He knew that very few horses can recover their strength and endurance while traveling in an express car. But he didn't mention his doubts. Instead, he talked with Hammond a few minutes longer, then went to see that his horse had been properly cared for.

Jones, with his little roan horse, arrived in St. Joseph that night and came to the hotel just as Dillon and Hammond had finished dinner. The same old quizzical smile that had won Dillon's friendship during a former race was on the Wyoming rider's face as he shook hands and was introduced to Hammond.

"I'm with you, all the way," Jones said, when Dillon had told him of the race and the handicap under which their team must run. "But we'll sure have to keep an eye on that Mortley gang. Mortley's crooked, even if he has got the confidence of the Continental officials. He had the nerve to try to bribe me to throw the race to their team in case we are near them at the finish."

"What did you say to him?" Hammond asked.

"I told him to go to hell."

Hammond and Dillon both smiled, then Jones continued.

"That ain't the worst of it, though. He found out you had leased Imperator, and he's taken the horse away from us. Workland's a hog for money, and Mortley offered him twice what you did and agreed to run the horse only the last lap of the race. Mortley boasted that he may not have to use Imperator at all, but he's willing to pay that money just to keep us from using the horse."

That news was a bitter disappointment to Dillon. He had reasoned that of his string only Sagamore, Speedaway and Imperator were capable of any great speed. Pathfinder might make a good showing, and he might not, while Patsy, while fast and game to the core, was, after all, only a cow-pony and hardly to be expected to more than hold his own against the Continental thoroughbreds.

Pathfinder and Speedaway arrived the day before the race was to begin, and Dillon began carrying out his plans. He sent Jones to Valley Falls with Patsy, a distance of fifty miles, and Pathfinder on to Topeka. He intended to start the race with Speedaway and hold Sagamore until the contest was well under way.

The starting time of the race had been set at seven o'clock the next morning, but Dillon was awakened long before that time by the ringing of his telephone. A voice over the wire told him that one of his horses had been injured, and he finished dressing as he ran to the stables where the horses were being kept.

He found several men gathered about one of his stalls when he arrived and learned that it was Speedaway the message had been about. The horse was limping from pain each time he stepped, and his right foreleg was badly swollen. Speedaway's rider, who had volunteered to sleep near the horse that night, exhibited a small piece of blood-stained piano-wire as he tried to explain.

"They must have got to Speedaway some time yesterday, because I rather thought he was favoring that foot a little when I exercised him last night. He woke me up by kicking his stall a little while ago, and when I examined his leg, I found this drawn tight around it, just under the fetlock. It had cut into the hide and caused the tendon to start swelling."

The anger that every lover of horses feels at seeing a noble animal injured--perhaps ruined for life--surged through Dillon as he examined Speedaway's leg. But he said nothing. The horse was out of the race for several days, he knew, but he realized the impossibility of finding the guilty person before the start of the contest. He found Sagamore uninjured, then called a veterinary to care for Speedaway and returned to his hotel to alter his plans.

Hammond was dismayed at the news of Speedaway's injury, and after breakfast, went to report the matter to the race officials. Dillon settled his account at the hotel, then returned to the stable and walked Sagamore to the open space surrounding a stone monument from which the race was to start.

Through the iron bars surrounding the memorial, Dillon read the inscription it bore: "Dedicated to the Pony Express, which started from this point April 3, 1860."

As Dillon dismounted in front of the railing Hammond came forward to meet him, carrying a small express pouch which bore a figure "3." This bag was to contain the registered parcel of express and would be passed from rider to rider of the Dell-Argo team, Hammond explained, and the figure would identify the team. Dillon, glancing at the other riders, noticed that each carried a similar pouch, though the bags bore different numbers.

"There's Mortley," Hammond remarked, indicating a sharp-faced, heavily-built man who had walked over to a slim sorrel horse. Dillon studied Mortley as the Continental team manager stood talking to the rider of the sorrel, and he decided that Jones' summary of Mortley had been correct. Mortley's face showed cunning and cruelty--the kind of a man who might injure a horse in order to win a race.

The contest had aroused nation-wide interest, and Sagamore, because of his great size and beauty, drew the attention of the crowd that had gathered to witness the start. The horse towered above the other animals waiting to enter the race, but his great body was evenly proportioned--the withers high and the muscles long and clean--hinting of the speed and endurance of which he was capable.

The mayor of the city and a grizzled old man, the latter once a Pony Express rider himself, had been selected as official starters of the race, and a hush fell upon the crowd as they arrived. The mayor climbed to the top of the monument, then called the express company officials and the riders closer as he made a short address, dealing with the history of the Pony Express and the significance of the occasion.

Outside the iron railing a clerk was seated at a table on which lay an open ledger, and in this, Dillon and the other riders wrote their names and the names of their horses. Then each rider was given a small, registered parcel, the horses were lined up before the railing, and at a signal from the old express rider, the race was on.

All five of the riders were experienced men, so there was no bolting of horses at the start. Instead, they cantered down the city streets to the outskirts, then picked up a bit more speed as they swung out upon the historic old trail. Realizing that Sagamore's great strength would probably be tested to the utmost before the race ended, Dillon held the big stallion back a trifle, though he could easily have taken the lead.

The great highway extends almost due west from St. Joseph for some distance, then dips gradually to the long bridge that spans the Missouri River. Sagamore's hoofs beat a lone rhythm as he followed the other horses across the bridge, then Dillon allowed him to lengthen his stride sufficiently to follow them closely. Near the outskirts of Atchison, the first change station, Dillon spoke to the big horse and let him speed up so as to reach the station on even terms with the other horses.

The other teams changed horses and riders at Atchison, but Dillon was to ride on through. He swung from the saddle to register his package and secure a drink for his horse, then resumed his ride. The rider of the Interstate team had been slow in getting away from the change station, and Dillon overtook him a few miles from the outskirts of the city.

A mile farther on Dillon and the Interstate rider came upon a bay gelding that had loosened a shoe and was striking his leg when he stepped. This horse belonged to the Overland team. The rider carried no tools, but Dillon did, and it required but a moment to remove the horse's front shoes. The bay, once the dangerous shoe had been removed, had good speed, and the three horses traveled together into Valley Falls, overtaking the National Express Company rider just before they reached the city limits.

Jones was waiting at the Valley Falls station with the game little roan and Dillon transferred the Dell-Argo package to him. Dillon stood watching a moment, as Jones, cowboy fashion, twisted in his saddle to wave, then he turned to Hammond, who had been waiting at the station.

"How's Speedaway?" he inquired, since Hammond had remained in St. Joseph for a short time after the start of the race.

"Out of the race, except perhaps at the very end. The tendon is badly swollen, but the veterinary hopes to have him in shape to run within three or four days. By the way, I had a talk with John Bristol, president of the Continental, before I left St. Joseph. He thinks we're mistaken about Mortley having anything to do with injuring Speedaway, but he assured me that he'll have the judges keep a close watch on Mortley the remainder of the race. He says that Mortley has spent a lot of company money and bet all the cash he could raise himself on the Continental team, but it's a certainty the company won't back him in any crookedness."

Hammond had arranged for an express car on the afternoon train, and after caring for his horse and hiring the city marshall to guard the car while he was away, Dillon and Hammond ate lunch at a nearby restaurant, then returned to the depot. The afternoon train took the car into Topeka on good time, and Dillon looked up Pathfinder's rider, a slim youth by the name of Montauk, to make arrangements for Pathfinder to run to Council Grove, a distance of three change stations.

It was late afternoon when the first horse, carrying an Interstate rider, raced up to the Topeka change station and registered his package. Jones came in second, smiling with satisfaction that his little roan had outgamed three faster horses. Pathfinder at once set out for Council Grove with the Dell-Argo package, and an hour later, Dillon and Jones, with their horses, were asleep in the speeding express car, resting while the opportunity offered.

Hammond had arranged accommodations for his riders and horses along the route, but Dillon ignored the hotels when he reached Council Grove. He had already experienced the underhand methods of Dan Mortley, so he finished his night's sleep on a cot in Sagamore's stall.

The riders were expected in Council Grove about eight o'clock the next morning, so Dillon took his time at breakfast. Then, making sure that Sagamore was ready, he walked the horse to the change station. Pathfinder was the third horse to arrive at the station, and after instructing Montauk about shipping his horse ahead, Dillon and Sagamore again took up the race.

The contest had developed into a steady grind by this time, each team fighting to gain and hold the lead. The National rider had led out of Council Grove--riding a trim iron-gray mare--but Mortley had now begun to use his faster horses. When Sagamore's steady gait enabled him to overtake one of the leading horses within the first ten miles, it proved to be the National mare.

Sagamore was running easily, his long, free lope clipping off the miles. It was twenty-six miles to Herrington, the next change station, and he allowed Sagamore to show a bit more speed in the last five miles. Even then, the Continental had already changed and sent its package on ahead when Dillon reached the station.

From Herrington the trail swings south to Marion, another stretch of twenty-six miles. South of Lincolnville, the halfway point, Sagamore caught up with the Continental rider. Realizing that this rider would not yield his place without a bitter race that might injure both horses, Dillon was content to ride into Marion on even terms.

Another Continental horse was waiting at the Marion station--this one a fine bay stallion that stood quivering with eagerness. Sagamore had already run fifty-two miles that day, but Dillon knew the great beast's power, so he clung steadily to the fast pace set by the bay. Mile after mile the two horses galloped down the dust-swept highway, then the bay began to weaken from the terrific pace and Dillon felt the elation of knowing that he led in the contest.

The shaggy little cow-horse was waiting with a thoroughbred racer of the Continental string when Dillon rode up to the station at Canton and transferred the registered parcel to his team-mate.

"Somebody tried to get into Patsy's stall last night," Jones said, patting a gun that swung on his hip. "I got a permit from the sheriff here and strapped on my old hardware. The man that tries to hurt my horse will be askin' St. Peter who won this race."

"Good," Dillon replied. "I'm packing a gun myself, and I'll use it before I'll let anyone cripple my horse."

From McPherson, across the wheat fields of Kansas, the lead alternated between the Continental and Dell-Argo teams. Patsy lost the lead in his lap of the race, but his rider turned the package over to Pathfinder on good time at Ellinwood. The lean bay horse surprised both Dillon and Hammond by leading the race into Garfield.

Sagamore made the run to Dodge City that night and still held the lead, but the faster horses of the Continental string forged ahead of Patsy the next day. At Garden City, Pathfinder had cut down the Continental lead to less than an hour. Dillon crowded Sagamore as much as he dared that day, but Mortley was changing horses every twenty-five miles, and he still retained the lead at Lamar, Colorado.

At La Junta, where Dillon had to wait for a change of trains, he received a telegram from Hammond, at Trinidad, that increased his confidence of winning. Speedaway had recovered from his injury and would arrive at Las Vegas that night. Dillon replied by wire, requesting Hammond to send Speedaway to the last change station at Glorieta, N. M., from where he could carry the package into Santa Fe. Dillon had wanted that honor for Sagamore, but he thought it better to let a fresh horse race against Imperator at the finish.

Jones brought the Dell-Argo package through Las Animas and La Junta and swung southward toward the New Mexico boundary, ending a long, hard ride at Timpas. Dillon was waiting with his big stallion at Trinidad when the telephone brought news that seemed to end the Dell-Argo chances of winning. Pathfinder had given out after leaving Hoehne, the first town north of Trinidad, and was coming in at a walk. The rules permitted a rider to go back to meet a crippled team-mate, so Dillon quickly saddled Sagamore and rode back.

Montauk was heart-broken that his horse had failed after making such a good showing earlier in the race, but Dillon blamed neither the horse nor his rider. Pathfinder's condition showed that he had simply collapsed. With a quick handshake that means much between good sportsmen. Dillon took the package and turned back toward Trinidad. He was an hour behind the Continental rider when he registered at Trinidad, but he was still determined to win if possible.

From Trinidad, the trail enters the mountains, and here Sagamore was at his best. Without urging and without holding back, Dillon let the big horse set his own pace. Power is what counts most when a horse is climbing steadily, and Sagamore's mighty chest was the main factor in the long climb to Raton Pass--the long passage through the crest of the mountains. About halfway through the Pass, Sagamore overtook and passed the Continental horse--a fine animal, but one unaccustomed to such travel.

Several airplanes had been following the running horses during the latter part of the race, and Dillon had learned that these planes were covering the race for newspaper associations and motion picture weeklies. Just outside Raton, Dillon heard the drone of an engine overhead and a shaft of light from an airplane caught and held the big horse and his rider for an instant. Dillon merely supposed this was one of the news planes, but he learned more of it when he arrived at the Raton change station.

"See anything of an airplane as you came in?" the station man inquired.

"Yes, just outside Raton. Why?"

"Nothing in particular, only Mortley, the manager of the Continental team, was seen talking to an aviator at Trinidad, and the judges have noticed that one plane follows the horses at night."

Dillon gave the airplane no further thought as he registered his package, and resumed his way. His principal worry was that Patsy, worn out from his long run of the preceding day, would be unable to hold his own against the Continental horses that day. He resolved to save the little roan every possible mile and let Sagamore gallop freely as he rode from Raton.

From Raton to Maxwell the highway passes no towns and few habitations. Mile after mile slipped by as the big horse, with the same gameness that had characterized the Pony Express carriers in bygone days, clung grimly to his pace. Past Maxwell and on to Springer, Dillon rode, turning the package over to Jones long after daylight had come.

Dillon had intended to relieve Patsy at Las Vegas that afternoon, but he changed his mind when he saw the condition of the little horse at Springer.

Hammond had chartered an engine to take their express car to Las Vegas at once, but as Dillon led Sagamore into the car, he said, "I guess I'd better stop at Watros. Patsy isn't much on speed, and he's about gone his limit at fast running. Speedaway will be waiting to finish at Glorieta, so I'd better relieve Jones as quickly as possible."

"But, good Lord, man, how about your own horse? He's carried the brunt of the race so far, and he's just finished running all night long."

"I know," Dillon replied, a touch of sentiment in his voice, "but that's our only chance. We must reach Glorieta on even terms or Imperator will nose out Speedaway in the final stretch."

As Dillon had predicted, Patsy lost time and the lead in the race during the fifty miles from Springer, though Dillon did not know of this until Hammond awakened him that afternoon. The airplanes and the telephone were keeping a close check on the race and reports were being sent ahead. At Colmor, Patsy had still retained the lead, but north of Nolan the Continental horse had passed him and a fresh horse starting at Wagon Mound had added to the gain.

Dillon, Hammond and a Continental rider were waiting at the Watros station when an airplane swept over the crest of a hill and landed in an open space near the change station. The pilot and a camera-man climbed from the plane and selected a position from which to film the arrival of the horses. Then a big black, with four white stockings, rounded a turn and raced up to the station.

Dillon gave a start as he recognized the horse. It was August Long's Conquest, one of the greatest racers on the American turf, and Dillon realized anew the limits to which Mortley had gone in order to win.

The waiting Continental rider, mounted on a well-built sorrel, was on his way almost as soon as Conquest's rider had touched the ground. Then came an agonizing wait for Dillon. He knew that Patsy could not be expected to cope with the speed of Conquest after what the little horse had already done, yet it hurt him to think that each leap of the sorrel was carrying the Continental package farther and farther ahead while the big, patient stallion could only wait.

Ten minutes, then fifteen passed, while Dillon and Hammond stood waiting. The watch-hands showed that the Continental rider had a twenty-minute lead when the little roan, lathered with perspiration and trembling in every muscle, yet still running, galloped up to the station.

"We done our best," Jones said, stumbling as he climbed from the saddle. "I nosed out their first horse, but that black devil was too fast for us."

"We know that, Laramie," Dillon answered, and leaving Hammond to explain further, he leaped upon Sagamore. His last view of the station, as Sagamore swept round a turn in the street, was of a worn out little horse standing with outspread legs and heaving sides.

Dillon knew that a twenty-minute lead meant miles to the Continental team, and he determined to overcome that handicap as soon as possible. Accordingly, he sent Sagamore forward at a fast lope. At Las Vegas, which he reached just at dusk, the ledger showed that the Continental had registered and changed horses twelve minutes ahead of him.

The gain encouraged Dillon and he left Las Vegas confident of overtaking the rival team before reaching the next change station. But he was doomed to disappointment. At Chappelle, he found that the other team was twenty-five minutes ahead of him, and that a relief rider had gone back on the trail to meet his team-mate.

The unexpected gain puzzled Dillon. He knew that the Continental horses were fast, and he began to wonder if, in his great desire to win, he had overtaxed his own horse. He knew that days of hard, steady running--with sleep broken by the swaying of railway cars--will wear down the endurance of any horse. And yet, strangely, Sagamore seemed to be running easily.

As a test, he spoke to the horse and the speed with which Sagamore responded caused him to tighten the reins a trifle. Fulton was the next change station, and Dillon found encouragement there. He had cut down the Continental lead to thirteen minutes, and once past the change station, he sent Sagamore forward at racing speed.

A few miles out of Glorieta and the sun began tinting the sky, making the road safer, even if it meant no increase in Sagamore's speed. Daylight showed the perspiration lathered about the horse's shoulders and flanks, while the sound of his breathing told Dillon that the strain of the race was showing on the horse.

Except for a little group of men about the change station, the town of Glorieta was wrapped in slumber as the big horse thundered across a plank bridge at the outskirts and came to a halt at the station.

Speedaway was nowhere in sight, and Dillon caught the station man's arm as he asked, "Where's the other Dell-Argo horse?"

"We haven't seen any other horses--except the one belonging to the Continental team, and he left here two minutes ago," was the answer. Another man had brought a bucket of water and was holding it to Sagamore's mouth. With a quick decision, Dillon checked the horse from drinking, then scrawled his name on the ledger and leaped back into the saddle.

"It's up to us, old fellow," he said to the horse as he turned into the highway and rode from the town, followed by the cheers of those at the change station.

Just outside Glorieta the trail swings in a great half-circle to pass a mountain, then zig-zags between hills and gulches almost all the way into Santa Fe. Through narrow passes and around sharp turns the black horse raced, his sureness of foot saving himself and his rider time after time.

The last few miles of the road is straight, stretching like a boulevard to the city limits, and it was on this road that Dillon caught his first glimpse of Imperator. The grand old horse was half a mile ahead, doing his best as he had always done, and Dillon knew that the final test of speed must come in that stretch.

He leaned over Sagamore's glistening neck, talking to him and urging him to the utmost, realizing that the loss of this race would mean the loss of his horse--a horse that he loved like a brother. The white horse had courage, and he made a brilliant try in that last mile, but the youth of Sagamore was too much for him. Up and up crept the black head until it caught and passed the white nose, then Sagamore led the way through Santa Fe's ancient streets to the judges' stand.

Hammond and Jones were both waiting when Dillon leaped from his horse in front of the clicking cameras and the cheering crowd to deliver his package to the judges.

Then, suddenly aware of his own weariness, he placed a hand on the shoulders of Hammond and Jones and asked, "What happened to Speedaway?"

"His car was brought on through to Santa Fe," Hammond replied. "Either the train crew mistook their orders and failed to leave it at Glorieta, or Mortley bribed them to do that."

"Well, we've won anyway," Dillon said, smiling quietly.

"We had already," Hammond stated. "The judges were suspicious of that airplane following the horses at night and had the trail watched last night. They found that Mortley had hired that aviator to take the Continental package from his rider between Las Vegas and Chappelle last night and carry it ahead to his next rider, who rode back to get it. That forfeited the race, and ends Mortley's connection with the Continental, because Bristol discharged him as soon as he heard of it. You'd have won the race if you had walked Sagamore all the way from Las Vegas."

And Dillon, as he stroked Sagamore's glistening mane, understood the mysterious gain that his great horse had striven so hard to overcome during the night.

SOME EASY TESTS FOR DIAMONDS

Here are half a dozen easy tests for diamonds. Real diamonds will stand up under all of them, but no imitation can come through any of them. First, try a file; if it makes a scratch the stone is an imitation. Second, cover the stone with borax, heat it and drop it into cold water; an imitation will burst, but a real diamond will not be harmed. Third, drop a little hydrofluoric acid on it; this will dissolve it if it is not genuine. Fourth, drop it into a tumbler of water; if real it will still shine brilliantly. Fifth, put a drop of water on it; if the water spreads it is not a real diamond, but if the drop retains its globular shape the gem is real. Sixth, make a pencil dot on a piece of white paper, with a lens focus the light upon the dot, hold the stone near the paper; if the dot can be seen clearly through the stone it is a diamond, but if the dot appears foggy or duplicated the stone is false.

DESERT DRIFT

BY JOHN BRIGGS

_Author of "The Last of the Kings," etc._

EAST AND WEST MEET ON THE TREACHEROUS SANDS OF THE PAINTED DESERT; AND ONLY THE SANDS WHICH SAW THE MEETING CAN TELL OF THE FATE OF THE BLACK OPAL, WHICH WAS THE HERITAGE OF AN ANCIENT DYNASTY

"One First Class Passage--Prince Yuen Ming Chu."

Thus his American Pacific Liner passport had read, thirty years ago.

The Chinaman halted his time-and-wind-worn outfit in the sickly shadow of a smoke tree. He was clad in blue jumper and overalls. His gray felt hat was peaked after the common fashion of the desert country. With hands long accustomed to the task, he slipped his diamond hitch, removed his bed roll, kiaks and canvas water bags, and after a few final jerks with the cinches, he had uncovered a dust-hued beast so diminutive that the revelation might have startled a casual observer.

After staking the little animal where it could enjoy some very dry galleta grass, Prince Yuen Ming Chu accomplished a feat never duplicated before his time, nor since, on the drifting surface of the Painted Desert. He picked up a long roll of heavy pongee, from one end of which projected a large bamboo stick.

Holding one hand under the end of the innocent-looking roll and pulling down on the bamboo, there suddenly came into being a flowery and dragon-festooned sun-shade of immense size. He gave another pull, and the bamboo stick lengthened out several feet. The end of it he stuck down into the sand, and then from the eaves of the contraption he unfolded four stay rods. With these in position, he gave a pull at a cord, and behold! the big umbrella divided itself at the peak, and curtains dropped to the ground. Yuen Ming Chu parted the curtains at one side and drew them up at the opposite side, allowing for air circulation, whenever the air should decide to circulate.

Laying a grass mat down under his silken shelter and seating himself, he proceeded to undo the rawhide thongs of his laced boots. One might have noticed that the fingers so deftly engaged were very long and delicately tapered. This Celestial son could not deny himself the simple luxury of washing his feet, notwithstanding the scarcity of water. That accomplished, he exhaled with deep satisfaction, slipped his sensitive toes into loose sandals and went about under the smoke tree gathering fallen twigs with which to cook his rice and brew his tea.

For thirty years he had wandered under the far stretches of brilliant skies and over the tinted dunes that had been as home to him for so long. He had pitched his dragon tent under the lee of the purple and vermilion cliffs and at the foot of God's Altar Stones, the needle pinnacles of an old continent which seemed to pierce the riotous sunset heavens. He had communed with eternal quiet and had become the intimate of the stars by night. He had come to America on an Imperial mission, and hopeless as it had seemed for years, he had pursued it long after the fall of Imperial power in China; for his heart was in the task.

His quest was the recovery of the wondrous black opal, talisman of the Ancient Tsins, pillaged by a band of smugglers from the old Palace of the early Manchus at Mukden. Under disguise he had followed the smugglers to their stronghold in Lower California. He had joined them. By assiduous cunning, he had located the great jewel. And then, almost successful, his plans to regain it had been suspected. A furious chase had led him through the wildest regions into Arizona and on up into the Painted Desert. One by one he had accounted for his quarry until one alone remained. And then that one had perished in a sand storm which had buried him and his fabulously precious burden without a trace.

The shifting face of the desert had altered with the long years of Prince Chu's search, he was an old man now. He knew the arid region as a parent knows his wilful offspring. He had witnessed the strange and various vegetation creep slowly over the dunes which he had with his own hands shoveled aside. He had seen old dunes melt and blow away, and new ones rise. Now he was bound southward across the desert to Flagstaff, thence homeward. He had found the ancient talisman of the Tsins, the remarkable black opal, the most precious stone, at least in his understanding, in the world. The silver-haired old Oriental could hardly picture the changes which had taken place in his native land. He could not fit his imagination to what he would find at the other end of his long journey; but here he was leaving peace.

With a gesture almost of reluctance, he stood erect and raised his arms in a simple obeisance before partaking of his last meal there. It was a leave-taking of reverence and almost of sadness. His glance traveled to the northwest and fixed itself on the far horizon meditatively. In the distance the hazy cliffs were slowly being obscured by an undefined cloud which seemed without dependence on the sky--a volume yellowish and murky. The dunes were stifled in dead calm. Nothing moved. Only the heat waves writhed upward as though to lick the still air in their ravenous thirst.

"It will be another hour, maybe," speculated Prince Chu. "Then the Twin Gods of Thunder Mountain will begin to sweep the desert." He had learned the legends of the desert peoples, and he had found beauty in their poetry. In his eyes smouldered a certain brilliancy--the look of a dreamer. In his sensitive lips, in his long, thin-bridged nose, spoke ages of refinement. Prince Yuen Ming Chu's family history stretched back two thousand years, even to the ancient Tsins.

After eating, he carefully rinsed and packed his fragile porcelain rice and tea bowls. Emerging from under his sun-shade, he righted one of the kiaks, and was about to repack it, when some inner sense warned him to straighten up and look back of him.

Staring at him, about forty feet away, were two individuals of the genus homo and otherwise not easily classifiable. One was taller than the other, and the shorter one seemed the most ragged of the two. Their much-traveled appearance suggested that they had been somewhere; but their lack of any equipment for a journey aroused Prince Chu's suspicion that their destination might be "just anywhere to get away from where they had been." He rightly guessed that their object was to put a considerable distance between themselves and the Hopi Reservation.

He had been long enough in the country to recognize these two specimens as a certain brand of unscrupulous white riff-raff, driven from the city slums, which was given to preying upon the Indians, in one way or another. It was evident that they were leaving the Hopi people under circumstances of haste. In one swift glance he gleaned all of this, and then continued unconcernedly with his packing.

After their astonished survey of the dragon tent, the pair limped nearer.

"Hey! Got any water?" croaked one.

In response, Prince Chu merely grunted and poured water from one of the bags into the stew pan which he happened to have in his hand. Still squatting on his heels, he handed it to the man who reached for it, and the other, the shorter one, made a grab for the bag.

The old Chinaman drew it back and held up his hand in refusal. He was particular about who drank from his water bags.

The bandy-legs growled a curse and reached lightning-quick toward his hip, but as quickly checked the motion. "Wot'n 'ell d' yuh mean?" he hoarsely demanded. "Can'tcha give uh man uh drink?"

"No savvy," responded Yuen serenely.

"Don't get too ripe, Shorty," cautioned the taller, bleak-nosed one with red-rimmed eyes. "Take uh swig outa this."

After draining the tin, the ragged Shorty extended it for more.

Obligingly, indifferently, Prince Chu refilled it.

"Can'tcha talk English?" questioned the sun-blistered rogue.

Yuen Ming Chu, the scholar, simply shrugged, shook his head and smiled. Though granting them their needs, with a courtesy inherently his, he desired speedy riddance of his unwelcome guests. An eye even less discerning than his would have marked them as a cold-blooded pair. A weapon bulged in the hip pocket of each, and their movements were nervous and jerky. Obviously they were assassins and drug addicts. The old Chinaman's only weapon, an antiquated shotgun, was still strapped to his pack.

"The freak is uh Chink!" suddenly exclaimed the tall one. The speaker's beak nose and pasty cheek points gleamed strikingly. Apparently the sun had not affected the small area of his face which was exposed.

"Got anything to eat, John?" he questioned. Then, as an after-thought, he performed the motions of consuming food.

"All li--all li!" acknowledged Yuen. He put more rice to cook, and added his last piece of bacon. Covertly watching his guests, who had stretched themselves out under the smoke tree to wait, he observed that they were stealthily watching him also. Their conversation was low mumbled. They evidently mistrusted that he might understand them; but they were careless enough to let escape a few words which could be caught by the ears so long attuned to desert stillness.

"Damn funny--Chink out here--Yeh, runnin' hop t' the Injuns--Got it?--Sure 'eez got it. All Chinks uh got it!--Huh?"

They ate their rice with poor grace, frequently casting surreptitious glances over his outfit. Yuen led the small burro in from its dry grazing and readjusted the pack-saddle. He faced the burro so that his gun would be on the opposite side of the saddle from the two thugs. He perceived that they were suspicious. An astute reason counseled him that their suspicion of him could arise only from their offensive intentions. A deduction in which he was right.

His long, facile fingers were not quite quick enough to release the straps holding the shotgun before the red-eyed one had sprung up on his long legs and had covered him with a mean-looking automatic. Plainly the man was a professional killer. His order to "Get 'em up in a hurry!" was undebatable.

Prince Chu neither hesitated nor hastened. He simply accepted his strategic defeat. The malign glint of the red-rimmed eyes behind the black bore of the implacable-looking instrument of death, seemed to project a cold eagerness along their line of vision; as though hungering for the sight of a blood splash at the spot upon which their stare was fixed. The tip of the man's protuberant nose quivered like that of a beast scenting his quarry. The Chinaman dispassionately made note that the drug degenerate would welcome an excuse to murder.

"No more stallin', Chink," the voice grated. "Yuv got the stuff somewhere. Come through!"

Had the speaker known that he was addressing a man in whose blood flowed the quality of blood which had ruled China for two thousand years; and that governing the unaltered expression of the face he was looking into, there was the kind of mind at work which is dangerous to cross even when deprived of every vestige of defense, he would not have hesitated to release the death which his taut forefinger begged to deliver. But he was not yet aware of his mistake.

"Let's have it!" he barked again. "Show us where it is."

"No savvy," repeated Prince Yuen Ming Chu.

"Hey, Squint," interrupted the scalded-faced Shorty, "maybe the crazy Chink don't savvy!"

"He savvies, all right," was the response. "Step around from behind that donkey, there, yuh heathen. Quick!"

Yuen obeyed. He knew that the murderer would shoot if he did not.

The renegade laughed. "All right, John. Now yer commencin' t' learn English. Where's the stuff?"

Prince Chu took his second discomfiture collectedly.

"I admit that I can speak your language," he said, "but you have not made it plain what it is that you want of me."

"Holy fish!" the gunman exclaimed. "What next? Yuh can talk, can'tcha? Whadda we want, huh? We want the hop, the snowflakes, er whatever kind yuh peddle. An' we want it right now--get me?"

"You are mistaken," replied Yuen. "I do not peddle opiates. I have nothing of the kind. If I had, I would gladly let you have it."

The Squint made only one response to this.

"Hell! He's stallin'. Go through 'im, Shorty. Try his pack first."

The short and ragged one tore the pack to pieces and left no space the size of a lead pencil unsearched. He finished his fruitless task in exasperation.

"Clean out His Nibs next," commanded the pasty-nosed ruffian.

Panting from his exertions and the blistering sun, the plunderer stepped up behind their victim, and keeping himself out of gun range, he deftly felt through Prince Chu's garments.

"I have not what you want," stated the Chinaman calmly.

"Yuh haven't, hey! Then wot's this?"

The eager fingers were fumbling with the clasp of a long, flat pocket case, black leather bound.

"It contains medicines, and certain chemicals, but nothing of value to you. Yes--cigarettes. Help yourself."

The case opened suddenly. Viewing an array of little vials, the searcher noticed one containing a white, crystaline powder, and his glum expression lightened immediately. He jerked out the vial and dropped the case to earth.

"Here's the snow, Squint!" he rasped excitedly, working at the cork.

The gun-wielder's drawn face relaxed in pleasurable anticipation.

"Mistaken again," remarked the measured voice of Yuen Ming Chu. "It is an anti-venom, to be used in case of snakebite. Should you use that as you would cocaine, without first having been bitten by a snake or the black spider, it would kill you."

The blue-bearded gunman's face clouded with anger. "If that's uhnother bluff, Chink," he threatened, "I'll croak yuh!"

"It is not a bluff," responded the silver-haired Oriental.

Sensing truth in the impassive words, the tall man ordered his partner to further rifle the Chinaman's person.

Prince Chu's face was still steadily expressionless.

"You are wasting your time," he said.

"Well, wot in 'ell er yuh doin' in this country, anyhow?" peevishly questioned Shorty, of the blistered face.

Before his question could be answered his exploring fingers encountered a chain of heavy linked gold about the Chinaman's neck, and he yanked at it.

"Wot's this?" he demanded.

For the first time, he might have seen a change come into their victim's expression. Exultantly observant, his partner directed him to snip the chain. When the chain had been removed by the practised use of a small pair of sharp nippers, the two crooks beheld at its end the most marvelous stone that they had ever seen. As large around as the rim of a tea cup, it covered Shorty's palm, while the gold chain glittered unheeded down from his hand. In the half-shadow of his hat, the opalescent lights flamed from the great jewel with a rapidity of changing fire which seemed alive--emerald, crimson, orange, pink and blue; fascinating, benumbing.

"My God! It's worth a million!" gasped Shorty.

Prince Chu's stern old lips curled slightly upward in their irony.

"Do not make a second mistake, my friend," he said. "In your dollars, it is worth ten millions. But if you should find it possible to dispose of the jewel, it would be worth your life."

"Wot's that!" the two exclaimed, almost in a word.

The Chinaman shrugged and smiled enigmatically.

"'Nother one uh yer Chink bluffs," mumbled Shorty.

"I ain't so sure," joined his partner meditatively. "But we better get movin'. Com' on! Stick 'er where she'll be safe, Shorty. Get that shotgun. Get both them water bags. That's it--both uv 'em. It's hot an' we'll need 'em," he added with a chuckle of grim significance.

"All right," announced Shorty, lowering his gun and grinning at the Chinaman with lips that twitched. "We'll toddle on, Ole Timer. Sorry can't have yer company."

"You may need it," tranquilly replied Prince Chu, commencing deftly to pick up his scattered things. "I shall not be far behind."

The gunman laughed unpleasantly. "I guess yuh'll keep outa gun range," he retorted, backing away a few steps.

"Which way?" inquired Shorty, loaded with the appointed articles. They contemptuously turned their attention from their late victim, now that they had rendered him harmless, they thought, and disabled by lack of water.

"Wait uh minute," the Squint interjected. "Let's see the rock. I wanna look at it close."

Shorty dug the great black opal from an inner pocket and was about to hand it to the other, when he halted suspiciously.

"Yuh ain't startin' nothin', Squint, are yuh?" he inquired.

"Com' on, yuh boob," protested the other. "How could I? We're t'gether, ain't we? Ain't there enough in it fer both uv us, anyhow? I jus' wanna see how the thing feels. Gee, she's some rock!" he exulted, as Shorty released the great jewel unwillingly. He allowed his attention to be consumed by the fascinating opal for a moment, and then he slipped the stone into an inner vest pocket.

"Hey, you! Wot're yuh comin' on me?" challenged the ragged one.

"Yer pockets're apt t' have holes in 'em, Shorty----"

At this point they were interrupted by the even-toned, dispassionate voice of the Chinaman. He had stood up from his patient reassembling, and there was such a contempt, such an impalpable foreboding in his voice, that both bad-men were impressed with a vague apprehension.

"Mr. Shorty, you have made your third mistake today," came the veiled, slowly articulated words.

Then addressing them both, "You have never seen such a stone, before, have you?"

"Com' on--cut it short," interrupted the squint-eyed.

"There is only one such stone in the world," continued Prince Chu, unhastened. "It has ruled empires for ten thousand years. Before this, thieves have stolen it; yet none have kept it long, except its rightful owners." He paused impressively.

Despite their callousness, the two thugs were getting a little nervous. Each had been speculating on the almost impossible value of the jewel. How could they dispose of it? Perhaps he was right. Maybe it wasn't intended for such as they. Still they should be able to realize something out of it.

"It has this peculiar faculty," continued the smooth, unruffled voice, "that when it falls into the hands of one who is not entitled to it, the unlawful possessor will enjoy good fortune as long as he retains it; but if he should relinquish it from his person, it becomes his fate to meet a violent death, very shortly afterward."

Prince Chu allowed himself the shadow of a smile, then his inscrutable eyes searched the faces of the ruffians to note when the significance of his clever invention should have penetrated their heat and drug crazed brains. He knew that superstition was not peculiar to his own race. It was the common penalty of all killers of men. Murder had stamped itself on the faces of these two, for such eyes as his to read, and fear now swept into the features of the one called Shorty.

"Gimme that back!" he shouted, his voice rising to a strained pitch and breaking. "Wot'd'ya have t' take it for, anyhow? Com' on, Squint, lemme have ut back," he begged.

The pasty-nosed Squint laughed sneeringly, and his lips twisted in a simulation of pity.

There came a low whine over the distant dunes. The disputing pair had not noticed that the sun's light was fading out. The air was stifling.

"Don't be uh boob," gibed Squint. And there was a crackling edge to his laugh. "The Chink's tryin' uhnother shindy on us." But his tone carried no confidence in his words. There seemed to be an insidious, occult, inexorable something about this Oriental who had communed so long with the desert.

The badgered Shorty twitched his gun hand instinctively, then discreetly checked himself.

"Yeh--yeh, damn yuh!" he wailed in terrified anger. "Now yer scared to let go of it, yerself!"

Neither of them had noticed why their words had to be shouted. They were too wrapt in their argument to perceive that the dull whine had risen to a distinct roar.

Swiftly the Chinaman had gathered up his outfit, and he was cinching it into place on the burro. The cut-throats had taken about twenty paces from him when he had halted them with his recital of the black opal's mythical qualities. Still in verbal conflict, they moved on.

A wind puff swished over the low dunes, driving loose sand through the crackling branches of the brittle salt bush. An incessant rush of suffocating air followed. Little rivulets of sand began to lift and worm along the ground and spill over the rolling dunes. Dust cloud blanketed the desert.

Prince Chu picked up the lead rope of his abbreviated burro and commenced to plod southward, with his back to the swirling, wind-driven dust. A hundred yards ahead of him the fleeing pair were trying to take note of their position and were traveling undecided as to direction.

In the south distance, before the dust had filled the air, there had been visible the jagged outline of the San Francisco Mountains. Now nothing was visible save the immediate wind-swept surface of the earth, the troubled dunes, and the higher desert ridges. Yuen Ming Chu had no intention of letting his despoilers beyond the range of his vision. And he was obliged to shorten the intervening distance; for the hot wind rose into a hurricane.

He rapidly overtook the two wobbling, stumbling men. They were letting themselves be swept directly with the drift of the storm, hunched over, running, scurrying up the ridges, sliding down.

They were not concerned with their pursuer's presence. They had shorn him of harm. He looked down at them, as they picked themselves up under the leeward of a sand drift.

"You are drifting with the storm," shouted Ming Chu. "It is blowing a west angle to our course. You must walk so that it strikes first the point of the left shoulder."

"You lead out," faintly responded the authoritative one of the pair. "Move on ahead, there. We'll follow. But no damned monkey business, Chink!"

Prince Chu looked back at them as he brushed by with his burro, and he interrupted a significant exchange of glances between them. Steadily he bore ahead, and the very surface of the earth seemed to be lifting up to bear them all down into smothered oblivion. He was fully at the mercy of these plunderers who followed him six paces in the rear. He had read the meaning in the look which they had exchanged. They intended to coolly shoot him down when they had done with his guidance. The drifting sand would do the rest.

"Such as it is to be, so it shall be," meditated this silver-haired son of the Great Ancients.

They were not following him easily. The driven sand cut through their ragged clothing. Occasionally one of them fell headlong. Neither tried to assist the other. The shorter one seemed to be the sturdier of the two. The long-legged one stumbled more frequently. One or the other of them frequently called on him to wait for them. He perforce obeyed. When they were close behind him, Ming Chu could see contortions of fear at work in the pallid face of the gasping Shorty. Each time that his partner went down he registered a look of satisfaction.

Prince Chu smiled inwardly. The prospect of violent death was fermenting in Shorty's brain. His features portrayed a fixed terror born of the alleged fate dependent on his losing possession of the marvelous opal. His mind was caught in the dread that the prophesy's fulfillment was bearing down upon him.

The surface of the desert was moving, shifting; slow rollers rose and sank, and drifted on. The earth picked itself up and rushed whither the mad wind drove. Small dunes melted away, where they were not rooted down by the stunted growth. New ones swelled up before their eyes--swelled up and burst and crawled ahead. Flat rivulets of sand ran, riffled, spumed against the rifted cholla trunks. The wild dry sea tumbled, rushed and roared on, relentless, insatiable. The three men and the beast were pounded, blasted, blown tumbling with the drift. There was no longer any tacking against its drive. The slipping sand sucked them down. Each step made a whirlpool into which they sank, straining to tear free, while the awful volume of the wind drove down upon them.

The high outline of a sand ridge loomed suddenly before them. It was an elevation which had built itself up year after year, by reason of its resistant creosote bush and other tenacious growth. It was halting the rushing flood of sand, banking it back against the terrific current. They were swept toward it. Its base seemed swelling, crawling to meet them, and its outline was mounting higher and higher. They were driven up with the piling earth. The thundering volume frayed at them, pressed the breath from their lungs, tumbled them, carried them with it. A mountain was being formed. They shot across its summit and dropped as though from a cloud. They slid and rolled and lodged under the lee of the ridge.

His face bleeding, his hands shaking, the ragged, short man stepped backward from the creeping pile and laughed. The sound made the other jump and whirl around on him. It was a sharp, strained cackle--a mad expression of release from the immediate clutches of death.

The man's pasty face was pale green and drawn into lines of pain. He cursed the laughter.

"Laugh when we get outa this," he snapped, "er that damn Chink'll get us yet." He made a threatening step toward the shorter one.

"Yer scared yer goin' t' croak, ain'tcha?" he snarled. "Yuh wanna see me croak first, don'tcha? Well, don'tcha try t' start nothin' with me! I'm uh live man yet, by God!"

The smaller man stepped backward again. The sand sucked in around his shoe-tops. He stood still a moment, and then a curious, pained, questioning look came into his face. He advanced a step, hastily, and whirled about. Looking down at the spot where he had stood, he saw two black-spotted coils, one above the other, partly buried, and a flat, fanged head protruding from the sand. He had felt three sharp stings in his half-deadened leg, before he had moved.

Almost forgotten by the battered twain, the harmless Yuen Ming Chu had also observed the mottled coils and the venomous puffed head of the diamond rattler.

On recognizing what had befallen him, the stricken man's screech mounted to the whistling roar overhead.

"Wot'sa matter? Bit--hey?" interrogated the Squint.

"I'm croakin': now I'm croakin' sure!" gasped Shorty.

"Hey, shut up! Can the racket! Ain't the Chink got some stuff fer that? Sure he has.

"Hey, John--come through with yer snake dope. Bring it here!"

Prince Chu was standing about fifteen feet from the pair. Now he drew from his inner pocket the little flat case of medicines. Selecting the vial of white crystals, he replaced the case in his pocket and drew the cork from the bottle. Before he made any move toward the distressed Shorty, he emptied the contents of the vial into the palm of his hand. Sufficient wind yet stirred within their shelter to disturb the light pulverized stuff. So he closed his fingers over it. Holding it thus, he waited, while the flicker of a smile touched his impassive features.

The smitten Shorty caught the inkling of some subtle purpose back of the Chinaman's pause.

"Hey!" he yelled. "Wot'sa matter?"

He tried to draw his gun. It was packed solid in his pocket with sand. Frantically he dug it out, while his partner stood by, half-amused.

"No tricks, Chink! Come through with it!" he frenziedly commanded. He drew the pistol finally.

The old Chinaman maintained his distance. "Why should you shoot me?" he questioned. "If you should do that, the powder would spill from my hand and be lost in the sand."

A startled look overspread the features already terrified.

"If you come any nearer," was the mild assurance, "I will let the powder scatter."

"Hell!" articulated Shorty, deadened in his tracks.

"I will give this to you when you have returned the black opal to me," stated the scion of the Ancient Tsins.

These words acted as a spring releasing the afflicted man's action. He wheeled about to his partner.

"Now, will yuh gimme that?" he shrieked.

But a mortal terror had at last entered the face of Squint. He saw his partner dying a violent death, and he had no mind to release the uncanny stone which he was now convinced would work the same fate with him, if he should let it go. With the most desperate speed he had ever achieved in his lifetime, his hand flashed for his gun.

There followed a streak of flame and a report against the twilight and the din of the storm. The tall, squint-eyed man sank first to his knees, and then crumpled down into the sand. Death caught the horrified expression in his red-rimmed eyes and held it until he pitched forward, face down, his right hand still wedged in his hip pocket by the sand which had prevented him from drawing the gun.

With fingers shaking out of his control, Shorty turned the limp form over and clawed into one of the inner vest pockets until he triumphantly drew forth the smoldering black opal at the end of its shimmering chain. Half-crawling, half-stumbling, he started with it for the extended hand of Yuen Ming Chu. He had dropped his short weapon behind him, and the troubled sand was crawling down over the upturned form of his victim.

He did not reach the outstretched hand, even though Prince Chu was coming to meet him. His face purpled in blotches, his breath choked, and the grip of convulsion tore him down.

The old son of the Tsins and the Mings stooped over him for a moment and examined the purpled veins and the black, contorted features. He shook his head.

"Too late," he murmured.

And again opening his little, flat case, he extracted another vial, and from it he let a few drops of the amber liquid trickle down between the gasping lips. Soon the movements relaxed and calm wiped out the tortured lines. The sand sifted down and the moving mountain crept on.

There was as nothing where the two men had stood and fought, and enacted the latest chapter in the history of that great, black, lambent jewel; more precious even than life, outlasting death; which had ruled empires for ten thousand years.

The STORY TELLERS' CIRCLE

THE PONY EXPRESS

One of the most picturesque and thrilling institutions of the Old West, now given place to train, automobile and aeroplane, was the Pony Express. All too little fiction has been written around these hardy riders and sturdy mounts, all too little recognition taken of the sterling feats of courage and endurance they performed.

We are glad to publish Earl C. McCain's story, "From One to Another," in this issue; and glad to learn that tentative plans have been made to have the government issue a limited number of the old pony express stamps for use in the pony express relay race planned as part of the Portola festival in San Francisco this year. One hundred and twenty-five horses and twenty-five riders will take part in this race from St. Joseph, Mo., to San Francisco, following as nearly as possible the old Wells-Fargo route of the early days.

Mr. McCain, who is a Westerner himself, has investigated races of this sort, and in regard to the events of his story says, "There has never been a race of this exact type held. The nearest to it was The Denver Post Endurance Race, from Evanston, Wyo., to Denver. Twenty-three cowboys on broncos took part in this, Charles E. Workman finishing first and F. T. Wykert second, arriving neck and neck in front of _The Post_ building.

"This summer an endurance contest of a different type was held at Colorado Springs. The horses were to travel sixty miles each day and return, and at the end to be judged by condition as well as the time made. The sixty miles had to be covered in from nine to eleven hours. Twelve horses participated, the winner being Norfolk Star, a cavalry horse from Fort D. A. Russell, ridden by Captain H. E. Watkins.

"The contest continued for five days, three hundred miles, and Norfolk Star's time was 47 hours, 37 minutes. Jerry, a horse from Fort Sill, Okla., made slightly better time than Norfolk Star, but lost out by finishing in poor condition. Two cow ponies were entered in this contest, but both were eliminated early in the race. Rabbit, a three-quarter thoroughbred, finished second, and Fox, a horse of unknown breeding, owned by Ed Pringle, of Colorado Springs, beat out Jerry for third place.

"One of the old-timers here states that a contest slightly similar to the race described in my story was held back in the 60's, when the Pony Express was in operation. It is his belief that express parcels were started from St. Joseph and San Francisco at the same time, the race depending upon which reached the opposite destination first."

"EAST!"

You remember the scheme which we began talking about more than a year ago for boxing the compass with complete novels representative of the various points of direction? There was James B. Hendryx with "North!" which has just been published in book form at $1.75; and there was Charles Alden Seltzer with "West!" which was published in book form at the same price last season. At that time we asked you, our readers, who should complete the four major points. H. Bedford-Jones was almost unanimously chosen as the man to write the story for "East!" We are glad to say he has done so, and a ripping piece of work it is, too. In "East!" this author, whose Chinese stories fairly breathe the mysterious atmosphere of the Orient, takes us into the interior of China with a young American engineer who sets out to solve the secret of the Mountain Paradise of which no Oriental would speak and of which the Americans and Europeans heard the wildest rumors. Even its location was a mystery. Yet it did not take this Bedford-Jones hero long to find it, nor to solve the puzzle as to the identity of the goddess Si-wu who was reputed to reign over this ideal kingdom. The story, replete with action and adventure, leads the issue for next month.

Of the major points in the compass, it only remains now for some one of the best writers to give us "South!" Who shall it be? What sort of story do you suggest to complete the swing around the circle?

Robert Pinkerton will be with us again, in the next number, with "Downstream," a novelette of the Canadian bush country. And E. S. Pladwell, a newcomer for SHORT STORIES, will be on hand with a realistic and engaging Western novelette.

Among the short story men will be Edwin Hunt Hoover with another story of Dutch and Blue Danube--of how Dutch sang cowboy songs to a fetching young lady, and played detective--and how they all danced to the tune of the tenderfoot who "looked like a wise old bronc"; Robert S. Lemmon, back with another of John Mather's adventures in Ecuador, this time among the Jivaro head-hunters; Herbert Louis McNary with one of those railroad telegraph stories many of you have been asking for--only this tale will be equally enjoyable to those who haven't the slightest interest in railroad or telegraph affairs.

READING UNDER DIFFICULTIES

Short Stories travels to some queer corners of the earth and is read under trying conditions, but it seems that Major Altizer's experience wins hands down:

Editor, SHORT STORIES,

Dear Sir:

I have long intended to send you a testimonial of my enjoyment of SHORT STORIES. I have been reading the magazine for years, and I must confess that it does not fail to hold my interest. The style of stories you use can certainly be nothing else than beneficial to those who enjoy a life of out-doors and adventure.

There are numbers of your stories which recall to me times I spent right at the scene where the plot is laid, perhaps one of the reasons why I enjoy SHORT STORIES. I think one of my greatest disappointments was during the Great War. As you know, magazines were then prohibited from being sent by individuals to the soldiers in France. But I had a plan to overcome that. A friend back home would pick out the best stories, cut them from the covers, and mail them to me in letters. It happened that I had to spend several days and nights in a particularly exposed observation post, a letter had just been sent to me which contained a story from SHORT STORIES. Several hours later I was trying to read it, when, Wham; along came a high explosive and the debris entirely buried my short story, for I took the usual "duck" without consideration for anything else.

With best wishes for the continued success of your magazine, I am,

MAJOR C. S. ALTIZER, Cambria.

Danford G. Britton, author of "North Wind's Message," in this issue, is another who has run across SHORT STORIES in an out-of-the-way corner. In this case the wandering copy of the magazine was the gem from which Mr. Britton's fine poem sprang. As he tells it:

Something over two years ago I made one of my annual outing trips up into Canada. We were delayed in making our return journey by a real old blizzard and were holed up in our cabin for about three weeks.

The cabin had evidently been built for some time and among other odds and ends it contained an old copy of SHORT STORIES. I read the magazine through several times and one short article or verse on the North interested me especially. As there was nothing to do except tend fires, to pass away the time, I tried my hand at a little verse of my own. A few days ago in going through my camping togs I came across it.

Have you encountered SHORT STORIES under unusual circumstances? If so, let us hear about it; the members of the CIRCLE are no doubt interested in hearing of the queer adventures and experiences of the magazine--many of them no doubt more startling than anything that ever gets between its covers.

THE MAIL BAG

So many interesting letters are arriving from members of the CIRCLE lately, that it is a temptation to crowd everything else out to give them room. The more the merrier--and the better for SHORT STORIES--so keep right on sending them.

Here is one from a former South African, who will be pleased to know that there are several more of Greene's "Major" stories on the press right now:

Editor, SHORT STORIES.

I am a South African by birth, having been born in Johannesburg, South Africa, during the time Oom Paul Kruger ran the Transvaal Republic. Have been in America about twelve years and am proud to say that I am an American citizen; nevertheless, I have the kindest thoughts and remembrances of my native land and I certainly enjoy the "Major" stories. They are well written and the author must know his South Africa, which is a good field for good stories.

THEO. BEHR.

THE READERS' CHOICE COUPON

The Readers' Choice Coupons are beginning to flow in; keep it up! Cut out the coupon below, fill it out with the names of the stories in this issue that pleased you, and let us have it. It is your chance to get the kind of stories you want.

Chas. A. Beck was the first to send in his Coupon, and the good letter he sent with it is worth printing:

"Readers' Choice" Editor, SHORT STORIES:

As far as I am concerned you'll have to wait a few more issues in order to get my opinion of who writes the best stories. Just as I said on the Coupon _all_ of the stories in the ---- issue of SHORT STORIES are fine and dandy. I know what I am talking about for I am a reader of about ten different adventure and short story magazines and the stories in your March 25th issue are some of the best I ever read. I have read Short Stories for the last seven years and I never read a bum story yet.

CHARLES A. BECK.

What is your opinion of this issue?

READERS' CHOICE COUPON

"Readers' Choice" Editor, SHORT STORIES:

World's Work (1913), Ltd., 20 Bedford St., London, W.C. 2.

My choice of the stories in this number is as follows:

1 ____________________________

2 ____________________________

3 ____________________________

4 ____________________________

5 ____________________________

I do not like:

______________________________ Why? ________________________

NAME __________________________ ADDRESS ____________________

_A Selection of Popular Titles from_

HEINEMANN'S THREE & SIXPENNY LIBRARY

Robert Hichens _Bella Donna_

Jack London _Martin Eden_

Joseph Conrad _Typhoon & three other Stories_ _The Nigger of the Narcissus_

W. Somerset Maugham _The Moon & Sixpence_

The author of "Pam" _Yellowleaf_

Richard Dehan _The Dop Doctor_ _That Which Hath Wings_ _Between Two Thieves_ _The Man of Iron_ _The Eve of Pascua_

Frances Hodgson Burnett _The Shuttle_

Maurice Hewlett _The Fool Errant_ _The Little Iliad_

Marie Conway Oemler _The Butterfly Man_ _A Woman Named Smith_ _The Purple Heights_

E. F. Benson _Account Rendered_ _Mammon & Co._ _Juggernaut_

Sarah Grand _Adnam's Orchard_

Flora Annie Steel _The Gift of the Gods_ _A Sovereign Remedy_

_Wm. Heinemann, Ltd._

Short Stories Twice-a-Month

_THE NEXT NUMBER_

EAST!

A complete novel, wherein a young American, breathing the spirit of action, of the West, meets a secret of the ever mysterious Orient, and realises his desire for high adventure.

H. BEDFORD-JONES

_=and in the same Number=_

DOWNSTREAM

A novelette of the North, and of the forces abroad in the mighty stretches--were they caused by the mind of man, or by the gods of the Indians?

ROBERT E. PINKERTON

THE HIGH TRAIL

A grave choice confronted Rob Macdonald, lately come to the cattle-country. The high trail was the hardest to follow, but counted most in the end among the barons of the ranges.

E. S. PLADWELL

THE HEAD HUNTERS

John Mather, Naturalist, to whom adventures were all in the day's work, meets a fellow scientist not so lucky as himself.

ROBERT S. LEMMON

AND OTHERS

Printed by Richard Clay & Sons, Ltd., The Chaucer Press, Bungay, Suffolk. Published twice monthly by The World's Work (1913) Ltd., at the Registered Offices of the Company, 20, Bedford Street, London. Sole Agents for South Africa: Central News Agency, Ltd.