She hesitated for just a moment at the doors and then, with the faintest sobbing breath, was gone.  What wonderful eyes she had!  How they had looked at him in that last moment!  David’s fingers were trembling a little as he locked his door.  There was a small mirror on the table and he held it up to look at himself.  He regarded his reflection with grim amusement.  He was not beautiful.  The scrub of blond beard on his face gave him rather an outlawish appearance.  And the gray hair over his temples had grown quite conspicuous of late, quite conspicuous indeed.  Heredity?  Perhaps—­but it was confoundedly remindful of the fact that he was thirty-eight!

He went to bed, after placing the table against the door, and his automatic under his pillow—­absurd and unnecessary details of caution, he assured himself.  And while Marge O’Doone sat awake close to the door of her room all night, with a little rifle that had belonged to Nisikoos across her lap, David slept soundly in the amazing confidence and philosophy of that perilous age—­thirty-eight!

CHAPTER XXIII

A series of sounds that came to him at first like the booming of distant cannon roused David from his slumber.  He awoke to find broad day in his room and a knocking at his door.  He began to dress, calling out that he would open it in a moment, and was careful to place the automatic in his pocket before he lifted the table without a sound to its former position in the room.  When he flung open the door he was surprised to find Brokaw standing there instead of Hauck.  It was not the Brokaw of last night.  A few hours had produced a remarkable change in the man.  One would not have thought that he had been recently drunk.  He was grinning and holding out one of his huge hands as he looked into David’s face.

“Morning, Raine,” he greeted affably.  “Hauck sent me to wake you up for the fun.  You’ve got just time to swallow your breakfast before we put on the big scrap—­the scrap I told you about last night, when I was drunk.  Head-over-heels drunk, wasn’t I?  Took you for a friend I knew.  Funny.  You don’t look a dam’ bit like him!”

David shook hands with him.  In his first astonishment Brokaw’s manner appeared to him to be quite sincere, and his voice to be filled with apology.  This impression was gone before he had dropped his hand, and he knew why Hauck’s partner had come.  It was to get a good look at him—­to make sure that he was not McKenna; and it was also with the strategic purpose of removing whatever suspicions David might have by an outward show of friendship.  For this last bit of work Brokaw was crudely out of place.  His eyes, like a bad dog’s, could not conceal what lay behind them—­hatred, a deep and intense desire to grip the throat of this man who had tricked him; and his grin was forced, with a subdued sort of malevolence about it.  David smiled back.

“You were drunk,” he said.  “I had a deuce of a time trying to make you understand that I wasn’t McKenna.”