"Sometimes I'd think I was right close up behind you and then again there'd be times when I'd lose the scent altogether and have to scout round on the loose till I crossed it again. There's been gaps and breaks to your movements where I just had to take a chance and bridge over the jump and bulge ahead. Why, I'd lose sign of you and your probable whereabouts for weeks and months hand-runnin'. But I didn't quit you, not for a single minute, never, at no time." Having achieved the somewhat difficult feat of incorporating four separate negatives into one positive sentence, the pleased man-hunter contemplated his legs outstretched before him with a gloating, reminiscent smile. "Well, that's about all of the yarn," he added after a short pause. "No, it ain't quite all, neither. There was the way I first came to come to get you spotted definite. Startin' off, I says to myself: 'He wouldn't go east or south; if he did, he'd run into one of the Park hotels or a bunch of dude tourists on one of the main trails. He couldn't come back out at the west side because that's where people who saw him when he went into the mountains would be sure to meet him and remember him. So, if he's got any gumption at all, he's went north.' That's what I says, dopin' things out. "So I goes north my own self. About all I had to go on for a spell was a photograph of you that the home-office people dug up--that and a pretty complete schedule of your ways and your habits. I banked on them more'n I did on the picture--a fellow can change the way he looks, but he ain't so apt to change the way he does. As it turned out, I was right. Because when I'd worked along as far as Vancouver and made a canvass of all the dentists in the telephone directory, and run across one dentist over on a back street that had only just lately finished makin' an extra upper plate for a feller answering to your general plans and specification--a feller, by gee, that already had a perfectly good plate in his top jaw--why, then I knowed I was on the right track. "When you come right down to it, old-timer, that was what finally fixed your clock for you. Say, you certainly are a great hand, ain't you, for havin' two of everything? Yes, sir, you bet, two of everything!" Seeming to like the phrase, he repeated it again and once again. All at once then it flashed to Chaney's brain that in the drawled and deliberate repetition was a special emphasis, the hint and the menace of a special meaning. What was this guy driving at, anyhow? What revelation as yet unmentioned was impending? Then, with the next words from his captor it came--the realization. "I gotta hand it to you there, yes, sir. Two of everything for you, includin' aliases--_and wives_. Whoa! Stiddy, boy! Stand hitched!" For the bigamist, with a vision of state's prison before his eyes, had jerked so hard in his scrambling leap that he almost dislocated his shackled wrist and did rack the frail bed down. WE OF THE OLD SOUTH [Decoration]