STEVE HOYLE was confined to his room with a bullet hole through the flesh of his right arm the day following the meeting at Inwood.

He wrote Stella a letter informing her that John Graham had hired a gang of thugs to attempt his assassination on the night he was to meet her, that he had been desperately wounded in her service, and begged that she call at once.

Stella sent him a reply that cut deeper than the bullet from John’s revolver. It was very brief. Steve read it with muttered curses:

Mr. Stephen Hoyle,

I have long suspected that you were a liar. Last night you proved yourself a coward. Our acquaintance has ended.

Stella Butler.

Steve paced his room in a speechless rage for an hour, dressed to call on her and demand an interview, and suddenly changed his mind at the sight of a squad of troops hurrying past his door.

The arrest of John Graham had brought him to the verge of collapse. He trembled at the thought that his turn might come next, and feared to put his head out the door.

When ten minutes later the soldiers who had passed suddenly appeared at every exit of his house and loudly knocked for entrance, he dropped into a chair shivering with abject terror.

When arrested he turned his heavy white face toward the sergeant piteously.

“I beg of you, officer, allow me to stay here under guard. I am desperately wounded, by an accident.”

“You’ll have to go to jail,” the trooper snapped.

“But, my dear man, I can’t. I can’t walk,” he gasped with laboured breath. “Just let me stay here under arrest until I can arrange with the authorities to give bail.”

“Ye’ll have ter fix that at headquarters—come on,” he answered gruffly, seizing Steve and lifting him to his feet.

The heavy form collapsed and he sank in a heap on the floor.

The sergeant looked at him a moment with contempt, turned to his men and said:

“Keep him under guard till I report.”

The moment he had gone, Steve revived and crawled in bed, his teeth chattering with a nervous chill. The soldiers sat down and laughed in his face, and cracked jokes about the bravery of men who could ride well at night but sometimes fainted in the daylight.

The Attorney General had ordered Steve’s arrest on a shrewd guess which Ackerman had made on hearing of the strange fight between two groups of horsemen in the country at dusk the night before. The detective had seen the doctor leaving Hoyle’s house and learned at once that Steve was wounded.

In attempting to serve the warrant on John Graham he had found that he had ridden into the country alone in the direction taken by Steve Hoyle. Ackerman had long suspected Steve of complicity in the movements of the Klan, and knowing the deadly enmity between the two men had at once reached the conclusion that a feud within the ranks of its members could alone account for the situation.

“Arrest Hoyle,” he urged on Champion; “threaten him with immediate conviction for conspiracy and murder and see what happens.”

The Attorney General had taken his advice, and on receiving the report of Steve’s “illness” from the sergeant, went immediately to see him.

Steve was profuse in his expressions of cordiality.

“I’m sorry, General Champion,” he said, with loud friendliness, “that my father and mother are in the North at present. They spend a great deal of their time up there among you good Yankees. The fact is they are specially fond of you. My father, you know, was a secret union man during the war and has always voted your ticket since, though for social reasons he don’t say much about it down here.”

Steve winked and laughed feebly.

“Is it so?” asked the General.

“Yes, of course,” Steve hurried on, “and I want to ask you as a personal favour to my............