“I’ll settle with you for this!” Morgan slowly repeated, as if his brain were in a whirl and his mind still incoherent. Then he flung the cowboy a look of hate and disdain, and walked away in the direction taken by Santenel. * * * * * “Who was that there feller? The one that hit ye with the club?” asked Higgins, staring in the direction Dade was taking. “I ’low I was a fool to let him go.” It was a question that Dick could not answer. “There was only one thing I clearly understood about that business, and that was that you ran up against a bigger man than you could handle!” said Santenel, when they reached Morgan’s room. “Oh, don’t say anything more about it!” Santenel took a seat by the fire, while Dade applied liberal douches of hot water to his battered head. “But I want to know about it. I stood behind one of those trees while you were engaged with that big two-fisted cyclone, and I had my curiosity aroused. My advice to you is to keep away from him. He’s too much for you. What did he tackle you about? I couldn’t just make out!” Dade dropped the hot towel he had been holding to his face, walked to a drawer, drew out a photograph and threw it into Santenel’s lap. “That!” “Quarreling about this girl?” “Yes, if you must know. I didn’t care anything for her—not a thing! and I only went with her to spite him and make him jealous. I was fool enough to think it might drive him to drink. Either he didn’t care for her as much as I supposed, or that story of his all-absorbing appetite for liquor is a fairy-tale. I found out that I was wasting my time, and I threw her over. He heard about it, and he—well, you saw what he did!” His face crimsoned; not with shame for his treatment of Rosalind Thornton, but because he had been worsted so completely by Starbright, and the memory of it stung him to the quick. “A handsome girl!” commented Santenel. “Well, you failed!” He seemed in a lenient mood, and tossed the photograph back. He remembered that he, too, had met with a bitter failure some days before, when he thought he had Frank Merriwell completely under his hypnotic control, only to discover, when too late and after he himself had been hypnotized by Frank, that Merriwell had been playing with him all along for the purpose of getting him in his power and unmasking him. The recollection was quite as irritating as that which so stung Dade Morgan. Dade gave the photograph a savage kick, which landed it in the fire. Santenel watched it leap into flame and crisp and curl to ashes. A cynical smile sat on his cold lips, and the leaping flame seemed to light up kindred fires in the depth of his black eyes. They were peculiar eyes; and, as he sat staring into the grate, the pupils appeared to contract and expand somewhat like those of a cat. “You are wondering why I am here again?” he said, at length, to Dade, who had gone back to his hot towels. Dade affected a show of indifference.