He did not think it necessary to tell her that he had caught the cowboys of a big syndicate in the act of running a bunch of VN steers out of the country under the pretense of a general round-up, or that he had gone directly to the headquarters of the outfit with a rather peremptory request that they buy the rest of the cattle together with the brand, a suggestion that the guilty parties found it advisable to accept in view of the direct evidence with which he confronted them of not only this, but several other shady transactions of a similar nature. Nor was she aware, until several days later, that in the course of a slight argument which he had indulged in with one of the syndicate's men, whom he had caught red-handed in the act of branding a VN calf whose mother lay in a nearby gully with a bullet hole in her head, he had resorted to a little "six-gun suasion" with the result that the other fellow was in the hospital at Leadville, while Douglass nursed an ugly flesh wound in his shoulder. The syndicate, composed largely of eastern men who for obvious reasons could not afford to have their acts unduly ventilated, were very glad to close with his rather excessive demands, backed as they were by the smoothest-working gun and handiest shot on the range. She made the discovery In a rather unexpected way. They were out riding together one pleasant afternoon, and seduced by the magnificent going and delightful weather had prolonged their pasear into the twilight hours. On the return canter, Douglass's horse, affrightened by a viciously whirring rattlesnake on which it narrowly escaped treading, began to "pitch" violently and for a few minutes Constance was treated to an exhibition of superb horsemanship which made her blood tingle. It was an unusually severe and long-sustained struggle between horse and rider, but the man conquered as a matter of course and the rest of the journey was without incident. She had acquired the knack of dismounting by placing one hand on his left shoulder; in doing so, this evening, her bare hand encountered something wet and sticky. At that moment the door opened and a flood of light from the living-room illuminated them sharply. Looking curiously at her wet hand Constance caught her breath with a gasp. "It is blood!" she cried in horror. "You are hurt!" Despite his muttered assurance that it was nothing to be alarmed about she drew him into the living-room, where she became almost hysterical at the black-red blotch on his thin tan-colored silk shirt. Almost before he suspected what she was about she had unknotted the kerchief from around his throat and hastily bared his shoulder. In the violent plunging of the horse the clumsily-fixed bandage had become displaced, the wound had reopened and was bleeding freely.