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“Muldoon!” gasped Tish. “You Muldoon!”

“Not tonight or for the next two or three days. After that—- Tonight, ladies, and for a day or two, why not adopt me to be your nephew–what was his name–Sands?–accompanying you on a walking tour?”

Adopt him! The great Muldoon! We’d have married him if he had said the word, name and all. We sat back and stared at him, open-mouthed. To think that he had come to us for help, and that in aiding him we were furthering the cause of justice!

He talked for quite a long time in the darkness, telling us of his adventures. He remembered perfectly about getting back the silver for the church, and about Tish’s Italian, and then at last, finding us good listeners, he told about the girl.

“Is it–er–money?” Aggie breathlessly asked.

“Well–partly,” he admitted. “I don’t make much, of course.”

“But with the rewards and all that?” asked Aggie, who’d been sitting forward with her mouth open.

“Rewards? Oh, well, of course I get something that way. But it isn’t steady money. A chap can’t very well go to a girl’s father and tell him that, if somebody murders somebody else and escapes and he captures him, he can pay the rent and the grocery bill.”

“Is she pretty?” asked Aggie.

“Beautiful!” His tone was ardent enough to please even Aggie.

He sat without speaking for a time, and none of us liked to interrupt him. Outside it had stopped raining, and the moon was coming up over the Camel’s Back. We could hear Modestine stirring in the thicket and a watery ray of moonlight came into the cave and threw our shadows against the wall.

“If only,” said Sheriff Muldoon thoughtfully–“If only I could get my hands on that chap with the red beard!”

We all went to bed soon after. Aggie, as usual, went to sleep at once, and soon, from, behind the kimono screen across the cave, loud noises told us that Mr. Muldoon also slept. It was then that Tish crept over and put her mouth to my ear.

“That may be Muldoon all right,” she whispered. “But if it is he’s got a wife and two children. Mrs. Muldoon is related to Hannah.”

IV

Somehow, with the morning our suspicions, if we had any, vanished. Mr. Muldoon had been up at dawn, and when we wakened he had already brought water from a near-by spring and was boiling some in the teakettle.

Seen by daylight, he was very good-looking. He had blue eyes with black lashes and dark-brown hair, and a habit of getting up when any of us did that kept him on his feet most of the time. His limp was rather better–or his ankle.

“That’s what a little mothering has done for me,” he said gayly, over his coffee and mackerel. “It’s a long time since I’ve had any one to do anything like that for me.”

“But surely your wife—-” began Tish. He started and changed color. We all saw it.

“My wife!”

“You’ve got a wife and two children, haven’t you?”

He looked at us all and drew a long breath.

“Ladies,” he said, “I see some of my painful history is known to you. May I ask–is it too much to beg–that–that we do not discuss that part of my life?”

Tish apologized at once. We could not tell, from what he said, whether he had been divorced or had lost them all from scarlet fever. Whichever it was, I must say he was not depressed for very long, although he had reason enough for depression, as we soon learned.

“It’s like this,” he said. “They know I’m here in the glen–the outlaws, I mean. The red-bearded man, Naysmith, has sworn to get me.”

“Get you?” from Aggie.

“Shoot me. The other three all owe me grudges, too, but Naysmith’s the worst. He’s just out of the pen–I got him a ten-year sentence for this very thing, robbing an express car.”

“Ten years!” I exclaimed. “You look as if you hadn’t shaved in ten years!”