"Whoever was dreaming," returned the policeman, "it came true. You were advised not to return to the cabin, but to strike across country for Saddle Mountain. And here you are."
Devreaux swung around abruptly, his weather-seamed countenance grown stern and forbidding. "You're going beyond the limits of patience," he declared in a crusty voice. "I want to know how you people communicate with each other."
She met his formidable stare without the slightest show of alarm. "We people?" she echoed. "Really, Colonel Devreaux, I don't see what reason you have for trying to make out that I belong to a gang, or something." She sighed and shook her head, and smiled forlornly as she encountered the officer's scowling stare. "But I admit," she added, "that there are times when I almost wish I did. It's discouraging not to have anybody."
"I insist on knowing how that message was relayed to you," the superintendent persisted, unmoved by the gentle appeal of her half veiled eyes.
"You followed my tracks all the way up the valley to this place," she reminded him. "Wherever I went, you must have gone also. So if I'd met any one, or stopped anywhere to telephone, or held any conversation of any sort with anybody, why you couldn't have helped knowing about it, could you?"
The colonel regarded her tensely, with anger and something like reluctant admiration mingling in his baffled glance. "You say you came to this particular place only by accident?" he asked after an interval.
"I don't want to make a long trip to Fort Dauntless," she coolly replied, "and as you seem so determined to take me there, why I—naturally I wandered as far as I could—anywhere to get away."
"Humph!" grunted Devreaux. "That's frank enough, anyhow. Just wanted to escape from the clutches of the police? Weren't expecting to meet a friend here?"
"You keep forcing me to repeat that I have no friends," she complained. "I—"
She stopped with a startled gasp, and gazed blankly overhead, as suddenly, without warning, the stillness of the misty afternoon was punctured by a shrill shining sound—the crackling hum of a bullet in flight.