McCormick’s face was hard and relentless. He loved his older brother better than any one else in the world. The sight of Jim’s agony and disgrace had made him suffer torments. The man’s life had been almost ruined by the fiendish ingenuity of Andrew Jellison. Released from prison some six months before, Jim McCormick had done his best to live a new life, but the stigma of the ex-convict clung to him wherever he went. No one would trust him. He drifted from place to place, always dropping lower in the social scale, until at last Dick Merriwell had found him and, learning his story, sent him to his brother Frank, in the hopes that the latter might do something toward clearing his name and finding out the real criminal. It was small wonder, therefore, that Archie felt a bitter, relentless hatred for the man before him and was determined to mete out to him a full measure of justice. Jellison seemed to read this in the clear, cold eyes of the younger man. He was in a desperate position from which there seemed no possible escape. Unconsciously he drew one hand across his sweat-stained forehead. “I suppose you wonder why I didn’t nab you this morning,” Archie continued presently. “I wasn’t sure of you. I didn’t know your first name nor what you looked like. I couldn’t afford to make any mistake, so I went to Middleberry and wired my brother for a full description. It came all right, and I was the happiest fellow alive.” The bank cashier moistened his dry lips. “I wonder you said nothing to your friends,” he said, in a voice which held a ring of attempted bravado. “They would have kept me here. How did you know I wouldn’t get away before you came back?” His eyes glittered strangely as he watched the Yale man with an eager, furtive look. Something more than mere curiosity seemed to be beneath the question. “You wouldn’t leave without the coin,” Archie answered. “There’s no way out of here but by the path through the woods, and I was sure you couldn’t make it before I got back from the village. Besides, I asked Merriwell to get you out shooting with them this morning so as to prevent your doing anything while I was gone. I didn’t tell the boys about it because I wanted to clear Jim myself. I didn’t want anybody else to have a hand in it, and they haven’t. No one else knows yet, Jellison; but they will mighty quick.” “I think not!” snarled the older man ferociously. With a lightninglike motion of his arm, his right hand slid into a hip pocket and flashed out again, gripping a very serviceable-looking revolver. “I think not!” he repeated triumphantly.