“Yes, I do.  He has been under the noses of you fellows all the time.  He comes by night to the old graveyard at the White Church.”

“The devil!  That’s where they buried his wife.”

“Well, you fellows might have had sense enough to suspect that he would return to her grave some time.”

“The very last place that anyone would have expected him to return to.”

“But you had exhausted all the other places.  Learning your failure at them, I ‘laid for him’ there.”

“And you found him?”

“Damn it! he found me.  The rascal got the drop on me—­regularly held me up and made me travel.  It’s God’s mercy that he didn’t go through me.  Oh, he’s a good one, and I fancy the half of that reward is enough for me if you’re needy.”

Holker laughed good humoredly, and explained that his creditors were never more importunate.

“I wanted merely to show you the ground, and arrange a plan with you,” the detective explained.  “I thought it as well for us to be heeled, even in daylight.”

“The man must be insane,” said the deputy sheriff.  “The reward is for his capture and conviction.  If he’s mad he won’t be convicted.”

Mr. Holker was so profoundly affected by that possible failure of justice that he involuntarily stopped in the middle of the road, then resumed his walk with abated zeal.

“Well, he looks it,” assented Jaralson.  “I’m bound to admit that a more unshaven, unshorn, unkempt, and uneverything wretch I never saw outside the ancient and honorable order of tramps.  But I’ve gone in for him, and can’t make up my mind to let go.  There’s glory in it for us, anyhow.  Not another soul knows that he is this side of the Mountains of the Moon.”

“All right,” Holker said; “we will go and view the ground,” and he added, in the words of a once favorite inscription for tombstones:  “’where you must shortly lie’—­I mean, if old Branscom ever gets tired of you and your impertinent intrusion.  By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Branscom’ was not his real name.”

“What is?”

“I can’t recall it.  I had lost all interest in the wretch, and it did not fix itself in my memory—­something like Pardee.  The woman whose throat he had the bad taste to cut was a widow when he met her.  She had come to California to look up some relatives—­there are persons who will do that sometimes.  But you know all that.”

“Naturally.”

“But not knowing the right name, by what happy inspiration did you find the right grave?  The man who told me what the name was said it had been cut on the headboard.”

“I don’t know the right grave.”  Jaralson was apparently a trifle reluctant to admit his ignorance of so important a point of his plan.  “I have been watching about the place generally.  A part of our work this morning will be to identify that grave.  Here is the White Church.”