All of this was fortuitous in that it promised time for them to reach a definite objective which he had in mind—a place where the spent girl might rest and both hide until darkness draped the park for their escape. His sense of semi-security weakened, however, on noticing that a police dog was of the party; that the “mounty” on hostler duty was sending the animal up the brushy hill on the east—their side of the path. Slithering back into the depression, he awaited for several long-drawn minutes the alarm-bay of the canine officer, dreading the worst, yet not wishing to share that dread unnecessarily. Jane first felt the spell of the two brown eyes focused upon them through a patterned veil of brush. Nervously she caught his arm; pointed. Soon a long, black-tipped nose rent the veil, sniffing through a fountain spray of vine abloom with pale blue, bell-shaped flowers. The police dog had located them. But why the delay of his bayed alarm? A moment more and he answered for himself. With suppressed whines and insinuating wriggles there broke from the clutch of the vine none other than Kicko of the Sheepfold, his sense of duty evidently overcome by delight at the reunion. Pape’s joy transcended the Belgian’s. Never had he bestowed a more fervid embrace than that which encircled the ruffed neck. Jane, too, patted their four-footed friend and bedecked his collar with a spray of the flowering vine which had been torn down by his impetuous entrance. “Pin one of those blues roses on me,” Pape asked; when she had done so, added: “Out home we call that ‘matrimony vine.’ I wonder whether its use here as a decoration is any sort of sign that——” “I wonder,” Jane interrupted more crisply than he would have thought possible in her wilted state, “whether Kicko will lie low like a good dog instead of a police officer while you explain about those papers you took from the judge?” Because he believed absolutely in signs—hadn’t a sign pointed his way to her?—Pape was willing to wait for the answer to his question. Indeed, he had not earned her answer until after the Granddad Lauderdale riddle had been solved. With a shrug and a sigh he took from his pocket the sheaf of brown engravings. “These, as you may have surmised, are certificates for stock in the Montana Gusher Oil Company. See.” He opened and handed her one. “They are signed with names of dummy officers, as were the others. But they are blank as to owner and number of shares—right strong evidence that the honorable Samuel is the man behind the fraud—that his fat little neck is the one I came East to wring.”