PUBLIC excitement had been running high over the approaching trial of Dick Willoughby, but his delivery from jail by the masked night-riders came as the culminating climax. Mystery and romance were piling up. Despite the strength of the circumstantial evidence, the sudden fate that had overtaken the young heir to San Antonio rancho had been shrouded with uncertainty; no witness had seen the actual doing of the murderous deed. The sensational arrest of Dick Willoughby had been followed by his still more sensational disappearance; for he seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth—he had been spirited to some place of concealment to which there was not the slightest clue, while also the identity of his rescuers remained a profound enigma. All sorts of speculations were rife, and it was small wonder that the name of the famous bandit, Don Manuel, came to be revived. This was just the sort of audacious work the White Wolf would have gloried in—breaking into a prison, defying the authorities, leaving behind him a trail of mystery and vague terror. But shrewd old-timers pointed out that Don Manuel had never in his whole career helped a gringo—that his hand had been against every American, and that in his earlier days at all events he had killed ruthlessly, out of sheer lust for vengeance against the race of newcomers who had despoiled him of his ancestral acres. What reason, therefore, could he have had to help Dick Willoughby to liberty? Even if it had been the outlaw’s hand that had pulled the trigger against the son of his hated enemy, Ben Thurston, little would he have cared if a score of gringos had come to their end, justly or unjustly, as an aftermath of the tragedy. Old Ben Thurston had discussed this very question with himself. The slaying of his only son, the clever business deal that had called his own tricky and dishonest bluff and lost him his principality, the sight of his herds being driven away, the approaching eviction from his home—all these events crowding one upon the other had exasperated him beyond measure and completed the change of the already grouchy, disgruntled man into a veritable wild beast snapping and snarling at everyone. Yet his mind was completely obsessed by the idea that it was Dick Willoughby, and Dick Willoughby alone, who had shot his son, so there was no room in his small and obfuscated brain for any seriously renewed apprehension that his old enemy, the White Wolf, had come to life again. Dick’s escape from jail almost gave Ben Thurston a fit of apoplexy. It was the sleuth, Leach Sharkey, who alone of those around him ventured to break the news. After his first paroxysm of wrath, Thurston paced the room like a caged animal. He had begun to make a confidant of this man, his constant attendant, the protector with the handy guns in his hip pockets on whom he had come to rely night and day, the one associate who phlegmatically endured his irritable moods and abusive language.