“Hush!” said a voice so low and faint it might have been a whisper of the wind in the palisades of the corral.  But, indistinct as it was, it was the voice of the man he was thinking of as far away, and it sent a thrill of alternate awe and pleasure through his pulses.

He glanced quickly around.  The moon was hidden by a passing cloud, and only the faint outlines of the house he had just quitted were visible.  “Is that you, Spence?” he said tremulously.

“Yes,” replied the voice, and a figure dimly emerged from the corner of the corral.

“Lay low, lay low, for God’s sake,” said Patterson, hurriedly throwing himself upon the apparition.  “The sheriff and his posse are in there.”

“But I must speak to you a moment,” said the figure.

“Wait,” said Patterson, glancing towards the building.  Its blank, shutterless windows revealed no inner light; a profound silence encompassed it.  “Come quick,” he whispered.  Letting his grasp slip down to the unresisting hand of the stranger, he half-dragged, half-led him, brushing against the wall, into the open door of the deserted bar-room he had just quitted, locked the inner door, poured a glass of whiskey from a decanter, gave it to him, and then watched him drain it at a single draught.  The moon came out, and, falling through the bare windows full upon the stranger’s face, revealed the artistic but slightly disheveled curls and moustache of the fugitive, Spencer Tucker.

Whatever may have been the real influence of this unfortunate man upon his fellows, it seemed to find expression in a singular unanimity of criticism.  Patterson looked at him with a half-dismal, half-welcoming smile.  “Well, you are a h-ll of a fellow, ain’t you?”

Spencer Tucker passed his hand through his hair and lifted it from his forehead, with a gesture at once emotional and theatrical.  “I am a man with a price on me!” he said bitterly.  “Give me up to the sheriff, and you’ll get five thousand dollars.  Help me, and you’ll get nothing.  That’s my d——­d luck, and yours too, I suppose.”

“I reckon you’re right there,” said Patterson gloomily.  “But I thought you got clean away.  Went off in a ship—­”

“Went off in a boat to a ship,” interrupted Tucker savagely; “went off to a ship that had all my things on board—­everything.  The cursed boat capsized in a squall just off the Heads.  The ship, d—­n her, sailed away, the men thinking I was drowned, likely, and that they’d make a good thing off my goods, I reckon.”

“But the girl, Inez, who was with you, didn’t she make a row?”

“Quien sabe?” returned Tucker, with a reckless laugh.  “Well, I hung on like grim death to that boat’s keel until one of those Chinese fishermen, in a ‘dug-out,’ hauled me in opposite Saucelito.  I chartered him and his dug-out to bring me down here.”

“Why here?” asked Patterson, with a certain ostentatious caution that ill-concealed his pensive satisfaction.