The boy had the best of reasons for doing this. Surely if Gallup did not recognize the picture it would worry him sore just because he could not place the child’s face. A picture, delivered as this one would be, carried a message, a warning. And perhaps the man would fail to reason that it had been tossed into the room from the top of a passing freight car. If so, he would be at some pains to figure how it came there upon his floor. If the incident produced no other effect than this, Johnny told himself he would be satisfied. It would be another straw added to Aaron’s load, and to break and unnerve the man was Johnny’s game. But he stood to win more than this. He had made Kent admit that he had known Crosbie Traynor. If Gallup recognized that picture it was proof enough that he, too, had known the man. Then, Johnny felt that he would have discovered the reason for Kent’s subservience to Gallup. As he walked the tracks to the head of the switch just this side of the shipping pens he told himself that he could not lose. No matter how the play went, he won. The freight pulled in half an hour late, but Johnny’s calculation in regard to the amount of work the train crew would have to do proved correct. Swinging up to the top of one of the big box cars he stretched himself flat and waited for the switching to begin. In a few minutes he was rolling past Gallup’s house. Rising to his knees, the picture in his hand, he peered into the lighted room. What he saw there drove his plans far from his mind. In fact, so great was Johnny’s surprise that he had trouble in retaining his balance upon the moving car. Gallup’s visitor was old Thunder Bird! Yes—and the old chief was bound and gagged! Gallup sat before him. Another second and the scene was whisked from Johnny’s vision. Johnny’s breath came in gasps as he rode down the tracks. Some things were plain now. It was Thunder Bird himself whom Traynor had gone to see! Could there be any doubt of it? Gallup saw an enemy in the Indian. Why? What better reason would he want than that Thunder Bird had known Traynor, and that the old chief knew that he—Gallup—had known the man, too? People had called Traynor a stranger, but here were three men—Thunder Bird, Kent, and Gallup—whose actions proved that they had known him. There might be others—Tobias Gale, for instance—he was a mysterious sort of person. Indeed, no stranger’s bullet had ended Traynor’s life. Johnny fretted and fumed as the minutes passed while the car stood still. It seemed that hours dragged by before the engine came back to shunt the car down the tracks toward town. Finally it began to move. The boy felt it take the switch just before it crossed the main street of the town. By this he knew that the car was going on to the siding which managed to squeeze past the side of the hotel.