“He comes from Kiowa of course,” he would point out.  “Some feller who lives where the stage starts, and knows when the passengers carry money.  You don’t hear of him holding up a stage full of recruits or cow-punchers.  It’s always the drummers and the mine directors that the Red Rider lays for.  How does he know they’re in the stage if he don’t see ’em start from Kiowa?  Ask ‘Pop’ Henderson.  Ask ‘Abe’ Fisher.  Mebbe they know more than they’d care to tell.”

The money which at different times Cahill had taken from the Kiowa stage lay in a New York bank, and the law of limitation made it now possible for him to return to that city and claim it.  Already his savings were sufficient in amount to support both his daughter and himself in one of those foreign cities, of which she had so often told him and for which he knew she hungered.  And for the last five years he had had no other object in living than to feed her wants.  Through some strange trick of the mind he remembered suddenly and vividly a long-forgotten scene in the back room of McTurk’s, when he was McTurk’s bouncer.  The night before a girl had killed herself in this same back room; she made the third who had done so in the month.  He recalled the faces of the reporters eyeing McTurk in cold distaste as that terror of the Bowery whimpered before them on his knees.  “But my daughters will read it,” he had begged.  “Suppose they believe I’m what you call me.  Don’t go and give me a bad name to them, gentlemen.  It ain’t my fault the girl’s died here.  You wouldn’t have my daughters think I’m to blame for that?  They’re ladies, my daughters, they’re just out of the convent, and they don’t know that there is such women in the world as come to this place.  And I can’t have ’em turned against their old pop.  For God’s sake, gentlemen, don’t let my girls know!”

Cahill remembered the contempt he had felt for his employer as he pulled him to his feet, but now McTurk’s appeal seemed just and natural.  His point of view was that of the loving and considerate parent.  In Cahill’s mind there was no moral question involved.  If to make his girl rich and a lady, and to lift her out of the life of the Exchange, was a sin the sin was his own and he was willing to “stand for it.”  And, like McTurk, he would see that the sin of the father was not visited upon the child.  Ranson was rich, foolishly, selfishly rich; his father was a United States Senator with influence enough, and money enough, to fight the law—­to buy his son out of jail.  Sooner than his daughter should know that her father was one of those who sometimes wore the mask of the Red Rider, Ranson, for all he cared, could go to jail, or to hell.  With this ultimatum in his mind, Cahill confronted his would-be son-in-law with a calm and assured countenance.

Ranson greeted him with respectful deference, and while Cahill seated himself, Ranson, chatting hospitably, placed cigars and glasses before him.  He began upon the subject that touched him the most nearly.