“I've been thinking that maybe we have made a mistake. Isn't it possible the man with Miss Kinney is not Struve?” asked Neill. “That's easy proved. You saw him this mo'ning.” The lieutenant went down into his pocket once more for a photograph. “Does this favor the man with Miss Kinney?” Under the blaze of another match, shielded by the ranger's hands, Larry looked into the scowling, villainous face he had seen earlier in the day. There could be no mistaking those leering, cruel eyes nor the ratlike, shifty look of the face, not to mention the long scar across it. His heart sank. “It's the man.” “Don't you blame yourself for not putting his lights out. How could you tell who he was?” “I knew he was a ruffian, hide and hair.” “But you thought he was her brother and that's a whole lot different. What do you say to grubbing here? We've got to go to the Halle ranch for hawsses and it's a long jog.” They lit a fire and over their coffee discussed plans. In the midst of these the Southerner picked up idly a piece of wrapping-paper. Upon it was pencilled a wavering scrawl: Bleeding has broke out again. Can't stop it. Struve shot me and left me for dead ten miles back. I didn't kill the guard or know he meant to. J. KINNEY. Neill handed the paper to the ranger, who read it through, folded it, and gave it back to the other. “Keep that paper. We may need it.” His grave eyes went up the trail to where the dark figure lay motionless in the cold moonlight. “Well, he's come to the end of the trail--the only end he could have reached. He wasn't strong enough to survive as a bad man. Poor devil!” They buried him in a clump of cottonwoods and left a little pile of rocks to mark the spot. CHAPTER IV -- LOST! After her precipitate leave-taking of the man whose team she had bought or borrowed, Margaret Kinney nursed the fires of her indignation in silence, banking them for future use against the time when she should meet him again in the event that should ever happen. She brought her whip-lash snapping above the backs of the horses, and there was that in the supple motion of the small strong wrist which suggested that nothing would have pleased her more than having this audacious Texan there in place of the innocent animals. For whatever of inherited savagery lay latent in her blood had been flogged to the surface by the circumstances into which she had been thrust. Never in all her placid life had she known the tug of passion any closer than from across the footlights of a theatre.