Over the wheel I leaped before we had fairly stopped, and seizing Harry Glenn's outstretched hand, sprang in beside him.

"Hurry! Hurry!" I urged. "Don't let Bender catch me."

"Small fear of that," laughed my deliverer. "He's only got one horsepower to travel on; and I've got forty."

As he spoke he shot his lever forward to its farthest notch, and we went skimming up the hill, leaving my discomfited pursuer behind as easily as though he had been tied.

CHAPTER III

THE CONFIDENCES OF A CRACKSMAN

"I GUESS it'll have to be long hair and a goatee for mine after this," whimsically commented Harry Glenn, as we crested the rise, and turning in our seats, saw that Bender had halted to engage in an animated conversation with Cyrus. "Buffalo Bill never framed up a sweeter rescue of the Deadwood Coach in all his born days. You say the Apache chief who was chasing you so hard was Jerry Bender, eh?"

"Yes," I assented; then, realizing that his next question must inevitably relate to the purpose which had actuated the detective in his eager pursuit, I hastened to explain.

"I fancy he mistook me for Mrs. Van Suyden's maid," I fibbed boldly. "You know they have some suspicion in regard to her, and when he gave tally-ho after me, I thought it too good a joke to undeceive him. Great sport it was, too,” I finished with simulated vivacity, "leading him such a wild-goose chase."

It was perhaps not so good a fabrication as I could have concocted had I been given more time; but it served its end, and I forestalled further inquiry by quickly asking him how it was that he himself had appeared so providentially upon the

scene.

"Oh," non-committally, "I happened to have a little errand down in this neck of the woods. Looking up some new business, maybe?" with a significant flash of his white teeth.

"Or, maybe," I ventured, "closing up some old business ?"

He bent a glance of sharp scrutiny upon me. "What do you mean by that?" he demanded searchingly.

"Oh, nothing," innocently. I was twisting up my hair, and trying to restore my wind-blown, mud-spattered attire to some semblance of order as I spoke. "Only, I wish I knew the hiding place where you have that sapphire necklace secreted."

His hand gave such a jerk at the steering rod that we swerved far out of our path, and only escaped by a hair's breadth collision with a big tree at the edge of the roadside; but when he had regained control over the motor, he

attempted to pass off my thrust with a bit of banter.

"Don't spring those things on me without warning," he complained with an air of mock injury; "or you'll be giving me heart disease. My dear woman,” more seriously, "if you were a little better acquainted with our methods of doing business, you would understand what a 'pipe-dream' such an idea is. You must remember this is 1904, and a safety deposit box costs only five dollars a year."

"But if there were no safety deposit boxes at hand, and the necklace had to be concealed without delay ?"

He leaned over to pull the lever back a notch and reduce our speed before he made answer; then he straightened up, and bestowed upon me another of those long, searching stares, as though he would read my very soul.

"Look here," he said at length, "are you playing straight with me as you promised, or are you scheming around to spy on me, trying to give me the double-cross ?"

There was a hard, threatening glitter in his eyes very different from their usual teasing twinkle, a coarseness to his tone which be

trayed to me an entirely foreign side of his character.

In all our previous exchanges he had seemed to me a true son of Hermes, patron deity of thieves, light, airy, inconsequent ; now I recognised with a shock that he was also of the guild of Bill Sykes. It came over me suddenly that this was a desperado with whom I was dealing, one whom the very exigencies of his trade required to be cruel and unsparing.

We were on a lonely stretch of road with a steep, rocky bank upon our right, and running along its foot the railroad track. With my acquired insight to his dual nature, I realised forcibly that if he knew the stolen sapphires were then about my neck, or suspected that I held proof sufficient to convict him of their theft, my life would not be worth a moment's purchase. An automobile accident, from which he should escape practically unscathed, but which would toss my mangled body over the bank and in front of one of those trains constantly grinding to and fro, would, under the circumstances, be too ridiculously easy to manage.

I may have misjudged him in this. Often, in the light of later events, I have believed that I