Since Sheriff Harding had left his office in the county jail and had gone home to his ranch on the north side of the river some hours earlier, not a little precious time was consumed in hunting him up. Beyond this, there was another delay in securing the deputy. When Starbuck's car came to a stand for a second time before the mesa-fronting entrance of the court-house, Smith came quickly across the walk from the portal.

"Mr. Harding," he began abruptly, "Judge Warner has gone home and he has made me his messenger. There is a bit of sharp work to be done, and you'll need a strong posse. Can you deputize fifteen or twenty good men who can be depended upon in a fight and rendezvous them on the north-side river road in two hours from now?"

The sheriff, a big, bearded man who might have sat for the model of one of Frederic Remington's frontiersmen, took time to consider. "Is it a scrap?" he asked.

"It is likely to be. There are warrants to be served, and there will most probably be resistance. Your posse should be well armed."

"We'll try for it," was the decision. "On the north-side river road, you say? You'll want us mounted?"

"It will be better to take horses. We could get autos, but Judge Warner agrees with me that the thing had better be done quietly and without making too much of a stir in town."

"All right," said the man of the law. "Is that all?"

"No, not quite all. The first of the warrants is to be served here in Brewster—upon Mr. Crawford Stanton. Your deputy will probably find him at the Hophra House. Here is the paper: it is a bench warrant of commitment on a charge of conspiracy, and Stanton is to be locked up. Also you are to see to it that your jail telephone is out of order; so that Stanton won't be able to make any attempt to get a hearing and bail before to-morrow."

"That part of it is mighty risky," said Harding. "Does the judge know about that, too?"

"He does; and for the ends of pure justice, he concurs with me—though, of course, he couldn't give a mandatory order."

The sheriff turned to his jail deputy, who had descended from the rumble seat in the rear.

"You've heard the dope, Jimmie," he said shortly. "Go and get His Nobs and lock him up. And if he wants to be yelling 'Help!' and sending for his lawyer or somebody, why, the telephone's takin' a lay-off. Savvy?"

The deputy nodded and turned upon his heel, stuffing the warrant for Stanton's arrest into his pocket as he went. Smith swung up beside Starbuck, saying: "In a couple of hours, then, Mr. Harding; somewhere near the bridge approach on the other side of the river."

Starbuck had started the motor and was bending forward to adjust the oil feed when the sheriff left them.

"You seem to have made a ten-strike with Judge Warner," the ex-cow-puncher remarked, replacing the flash-lamp in its seat pocket.

"Judge Warner is a man in every inch of him; but there is something behind this night's work that I don't quite understand," was the quick reply. "I had hardly begun to state the case when the judge interrupted me. 'I know,' he said. 'I have been waiting for you people to come and ask for relief.' What do you make of that, Billy?"

"I don't know; unless somebody in Stanton's outfit has welshed. Shaw might have done it. He has been to Bob Stillings, and Stillings says he is sore at Stanton for some reason. Shaw was trying to get Stillings to agree to drop the railroad case against him, and Bob says he made some vague promise of help in the High Line business if the railroad people would agree not to prosecute."

"There is a screw loose somewhere; I know by the way Judge Warner took hold. When I proposed to swear out the warrant for Stanton's arrest, he said, 'I can't understand, Mr. Smith, why you haven't done this before,' and he sat down and filled out the blank. But we can let that go for the present. How are you going to get me across the river without taking me through the heart of the town and giving the Brewster police a shy at me?"

Starbuck's answer was wordless. With a quick twist of the pilot wheel he sent the car skidding around the corner, using undue haste, as it seemed, since they had two hours before them. A few minutes farther along the lights of the town had been left behind and the car was speeding swiftly westward on a country road paralleling the railway track; the road over which Smith had twice driven with the kidnapped Jibbey.

"I'm still guessing," the passenger ventured, when the last of the railroad distance signals had flashed to the rear. And then: "What's the frantic hurry, Billy?"

Starbuck was running with the muffler cut out, but now he cut it in and the roar of the motor sank to a humming murmur.

"I thought so," he remarked, turning his head to listen. "You didn't notice that police whistle just as we were leaving the court-house, did you?—nor the answers to it while we were dodging through the suburbs? Somebody has marked us down and passed the word, and now they're chasing us with a buzz-wagon. Don't you hear it?"

By this time Smith could hear the sputtering roar of the following car only too plainly.

"It's a big one," he commented. "You can't outrun it, Billy; and, besides, there is nowhere to run to in this direction."

Again Starbuck's reply translated itself into action. With a skilful touch of the controls he sent the car ahead at top speed, and for a matter of ten miles or more held a diminishing lead in the race through sheer good driving and an accurate knowledge of the road and its twistings and turnings. Smith knew little of the westward half of the Park which they were approaching, and the little was not encouraging. Beyond Little Butte and the old Wire Silver mine the road they were traversing would become a cart track in the mountains; and there was no outlet to the north save by means of the railroad bridge at Little Butte station.

Throughout the race the pursuers had been gradually gaining, and by the time the forested bulk of Little Butte was outlining itself against the clouded sky on the left, the headlights of the oncoming police car were in plain view to the rear. Worse still, there were three grade crossings of the railroad track just ahead in the stretch of road which rounded the toe of the mountain; and from somewhere up the valley and beyond the railroad bridge came the distance-softened whistle of a train.

Starbuck set a high mark for himself as a courageous driver of motor-cars when he came to the last of the three road crossings. Jerking the car around sharply at the instant of track-crossing, he headed straight out over the ties for the railroad bridge. It was a courting of death. To drive the bridge at racing speed was hazardous enough, but to drive it thus in the face of a down-coming train seemed nothing less than madness.

It was after the car had shot into the first of the three bridge spans that the pursuers pulled up and opened fire. Starbuck bent lower over his wheel, and Smith clutched for handholds. Far up the track on the north side of the river a headlight flashed in the darkness, and the hoarse blast of a locomotive, whistling for the bridge, echoed and re-echoed among the hills.

Starbuck, tortured because he could not remember what sort of an approach the railway track made to the bridge on the farther side, drove for his life. With the bridge fairly crossed he found himself on a high embankment; and the oncoming train was now less than half a mile away. To turn out on the embankment was to hurl the car to certain destruction. To hold on was to take a hazardous chance of colliding with the train. Somewhere beyond the bridge approach there was a road; so much Starbuck could recall. If they could reach its crossing before the collision should come——

They did reach it, by what seemed to Smith a margin of no more than the length of the heavy freight train which went jangling past them a scant second or so after the car had been wrenched aside into the obscure mesa road. They had gone a mile or more on the reverse leg of the long down-river dÉtour before Starbuck cut the speed and turned the wheel over to his seat-mate.

"Take her a minute while I get the makings," he said, dry-lipped, feeling in his pockets for tobacco and the rice-paper. Then he added: "Holy Solomon! I never wanted a smoke so bad in all my life!"

Smith's laugh was a chuckle.

"Gets next to you—after the fact—doesn't it? That's where we split. I had my scare before we hit the bridge, and it tasted like a mouthful of bitter aloes. Does this road take us back up the river?"

"It takes us twenty miles around through the Park and comes in at the head of Little Creek. But we have plenty of time. You told Harding two hours, didn't you?"

"Yes; but I must have a few minutes at Hillcrest before we get action, Billy."

Starbuck took the wheel again and said nothing until the roundabout race had been fully run and he was easing the car down the last of the hills into the Little Creek road. There had been three-quarters of an hour of skilful driving over a bad road to come between Smith's remark and its reply, but Starbuck apparently made no account of the length of the interval.

"You're aiming to go and see Corry?" he asked, while the car was coasting to the hill bottom.

"Yes."

With a sudden flick of the controls and a quick jamming of the brakes, Starbuck brought the car to a stand just as it came into the level road.

"We're man to man here under the canopy, John; and Corry Baldwin hasn't got any brother," he offered gravely. "I'm backing you in this business fight for all I'm worth—for Dick Maxwell's sake and the colonel's, and maybe a little bit for the sake of my own ante of twenty thousand. And I'm ready to back you in this old-home scrap with all the money you'll need to make your fight. But when it comes to the little girl it's different. Have you any good and fair right to hunt up Corry Baldwin while things are shaping themselves up as they are?"

Since Smith had made the acquaintance of the absolute ego he had acquired many things new and strange, among them a great ruthlessness in the pursuit of the desired object, and an equally large carelessness for consequences past the instant of attainment. None the less, he met the shrewd inquisition fairly.

"Give it a name," he said shortly.

"I will: I'll give it the one you gave it a while back. You said you were an outlaw, on two charges: embezzlement and assault. We'll let the assault part of it go. Even a pretty humane sort of fellow may have to kill somebody now and then and call it all in the day's work. But the other thing doesn't taste good."

"I didn't embezzle anything, Billy. I thought I made that plain."

"So you did. But you also made it plain that the home court would be likely to send you up for it, guilty or not guilty. And with a thing like that hanging over you ... you see, I know Corry Baldwin, John. If you put it up to her to-night, and she happens to fall in with your side of it—which is what you're aiming to make her do—all hell won't keep her from going back home with you and seeing you through!"

"Good God, Billy! If I thought she loved me well enough to do that! But think a minute. It may easily happen that this is my last chance. I may never see her again. I said I wouldn't tell her—that I loved her too well to tell her ... but now the final pinch has come, and I——"

"And that isn't all," Starbuck went on relentlessly. "There's this Miss Rich-acres. You say there's nothing to it, there, but you've as good as admitted that she's been lying to Dave Kinzie for you. Your hands ain't clean, John; not clean enough to let you go to Hillcrest to-night."

Smith groped in his pockets, found a cigar and lighted it. Perhaps he was recalling his own words spoken to Verda Richlander only a few hours earlier: "Do you suppose I would ask any woman to marry me with the shadow of the penitentiary hanging over me?" And yet that was just what he was about to do—or had been about to do.

"Pull out to the side of the road and we'll kill what time there is to kill right here," he directed soberly. And then: "What you say is right as right, Billy. Once more, I guess, I was locoed for the minute. Forget it; and while you're about it, forget Miss Richlander, too. Luckily for her, she is out of it—as far out of it as I am."