The Argosy, Vol. 75, No. 4 — page 110: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

812 open and his trunk busted open. Some one’s done somethin’ to him besides’ robbed him, I tell ye! find him fust!” In twenty minutes over forty men rode in four directions from the Mes- quite ranch-house. The ten left in charge were barely enough to keep things going and were bitterly rebelling against being left. Silsby sent them in the directions he thought best. It was more than prob- able that the sortie would be reported at once to the Double X-ers, and war was likely to break out with a fury it had not had a chance to work off for several years. The ranchman himself set off on his fastest horse for the Stone House. He believed that Sykes might have dropped a hint that would be a clue to Radford’s disappearance. In his own mind he was convinced that Gill was turning to account Sykes’s infatu- ation for Mlle. le Fevre and using the young man as a spy on Ted while he was sick in the Stone House and as a means by which he might secure the deed which he wanted. Behind Gill there was some one else. If Nick Bullen was dead’ it was some one who had a knowledge of the pos- sibilities of the Cichinino. He re- called Radford’s saying that Al Wat- son must be the instigator of the effort to locate the deed to the mine, since Frenchy was certainly dead and the proof of Bullen’s demise was so-cer- tain that he was blamed with having made way with him. ~ Suddenly, however, Silsby had an- other and what seemed to him a bet- ter explanation of the plot that swung around Radford and the deed. Gill was the whole thing in it. He had learned of Frenchy’s death; he knew that Bullen was dead and that the sus- picion of being concerned in his ta- king off centered on Radford. He was making a try for the deed on his own account. Faith in this explanation of events grew in Silsby’s mind as he rode to- We've got to tion before he went to Gill, THE ARGOSY. ward the Stone House. Perhaps Bullen had gone Fast to try to secure the deed in possession of the Radfords. But he had communicated his inten- Probably Gill himself had managed to get rid of him. It would leave him a clear field for his efforts to become possessor of the Cochinino. Silsby knew that the original papers” were made out in the names of the three men. He knew that an agree- ment with a purchaser. of any one of the three parts might be put into wri- ting and attached to the original deed, and it would be a valid claim on a third of the property. It occurred to him that he might hunt up the records and see if a trans- fer of any one of the three interests had been recorded. He would wire from Pinon after he had visited the Stone House and learned all he could. Reaching there and communicating what he knew about Radford, he learned just one thing—that Natalie le Fevre loved Radford. c ‘““M. Radford—deed not reech—the Mesquite Ranch?” she whispered dis- jointedly, after she had listened to him with her great eyes wide and the color receding from her face. “Nope. None uv the boys seen—” Natalie crumpled up and sank to the floor as softly as a little worn-out leaf relinquishes its hold on the limb, where it has clung hoping for summer’s re- turn, and falls to the ground. Alice and Silsby picked her up and laid her on the bed that Radford had lately occupied, and which had’ not yet been moved from the big.living-room. “Oh, I wish we'd never heard of Frederick Radford!’ Alice exclaimed miserably as she worked over Natalie. With an attention to dgtail which Ted had not shown, simply because he did not know the neatness with which incriminating evidence had fitted itself about him, Alice poured out the story of her connection with the Bullen case and her belief in Radford’s guilt. “He'd ’a’ bin servin’ his kind ef he CEOPMIG WOOKS (E@)