“I thought he was my brother and I was helping him to escape from Fort Lincoln.”

“Helping him to escape!  Helping Wolf Struve to escape!  Well, I’m darned if that don’t beat my time.  How come you to think him your brother?” the man asked suspiciously.

“It doesn’t matter how or why.  I thought so.  That’s enough.”

“And you were alone with him—­ why, you must have been alone with him all night,” cried Dunke, coming to a fresh discovery.

“I was,” she admitted very quietly.

A new suspicion edged itself into his mind.  “What did you talk about?  Did he say anything about—­ Did he—­ He always was a terrible liar.  Nobody ever believed Wolf Struve.”

Without understanding the reason for it, she could see that he was uneasy, that he was trying to discount the value of anything the convict might have told her.  Yet what could Struve the convict, No. 9,432, have to do with the millionaire mine-owner, Thomas J. Dunke?  What could there be in common between them?  Why should the latter fear what the other had to tell?  The thing was preposterous on the face of it, but the girl knew by some woman’s instinct that she was on the edge of a secret Dunke held hidden deep in his heart from all the world.  Only this much she guessed; that Struve was a sharer of his secret, and therefore he was set on lynching the man before he had time to tell it.

“They got away, didn’t they?” she asked.

“They got away—­ for the present,” he answered grimly.  “But we’re still hunting them.”

“Can’t you let the law take its course, Mr. Danke?  Is it necessary to do this terrible thing?”

“Don’t you worry any about it, Miss Kinney.  This ain’t a woman’s job.  I’ll attend to it.”

“But my friends,” she reminded him.

“We ain’t intending to hurt them any.  Come, I’ll see you home.  You staying at the hotel?”

“I don’t know.  I haven’t made any arrangements yet.”

“Well, we’ll go make them now.”

But she did not move.  “I’m not going in till I know how this comes out.”

He was a man used to having his own brutal way, one strong by nature, with strength increased by the money upon which he rode rough-shod to success.

He laughed as he caught hold of the rein.  “That’s ridiculous!”

“But my business, I think,” the girl answered sharply, jerking the bridle from his fingers.

Dunke stared at her.  It was his night of surprises.  He failed to recognize the conventional teacher he knew in this bright-eyed, full-throated young woman who fronted him so sure of herself.  She seemed to him to swim brilliantly in a tide of flushed beauty, in spite of the dust and the stains of travel.  She was in a shapeless khaki riding-suit and a plain, gray, broad-brimmed Stetson.  But the one could not hide the flexible curves that made so frankly for grace, nor the other the coppery tendrils that escaped in fascinating disorder from under its brim.