In horrified curiosity Jessica followed, slipping from shadow to shadow. She saw the sheriff kneel down and draw a collapsed and empty horse's skin from a figure whose thieving cunning it would never cloak again. "So it was you, after all, Prendergast!" the sheriff said contemptuously. The white face stared up at them, venomous and writhing, turning about the circle as though searching for some one who was not there. "How did--you guess?" The sheriff, who had been making a swift examination, answered the panted question. "You have no time to think of that now," he said. A sinister look darted into the filming yellow eyes, and hatred and certainty rekindled them. Prendergast struggled to a sitting posture, then fell back, convulsed. "Hugh Stires! He was the only--one who knew--how it was done. He's clever, but he can't get the best of Prendergast!" A spasm distorted his features. "Wait--wait!" He fumbled in his breast and his fingers brought forth a crumpled piece of paper. He thrust it into the sheriff's hands. "Look! Look!" he gasped. "The man they found murdered on the claim there"--he pointed wildly up the hillside--"Doctor Moreau. I found him--dying! Stires--" Strength was fast failing him. He tried again to speak, but only inarticulate sounds came from his throat. A blind terror had clutched the heart of the girl leaning from the shadow. "Doctor Moreau"--"murdered." Why, he had been one of Hugh's friends! Why did this man couple Hugh's name with that worst of crimes? What dreadful thing was he trying to tell? She hardly repressed a desire to scream aloud. "Be careful what you say, Prendergast," said the sheriff sternly. The wretched man gathered force for a last effort. His voice came in a croaking whisper: "It was Stires killed him. Moreau wrote it down--and I--kept the paper. Tell Hugh--we break--even!" That was all. His head fell back with a shiver, and Emmet Prendergast was gone on a longer journey than ever his revenge could warm him. CHAPTER XXXIII THE RENEGADE While the man whom the town knew as Hugh Stires listened to the tale of the street preacher, another, unlike yet curiously like him in feature, had slowly climbed the hilly slope from the north by the sanatorium road. He walked with a jaunty swagger bred of too frequent applications to a flask in his pocket.