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“There goes Doc. Horne, hell-for-leather!”

Mauney left Miss Byrne at the post-office, visited the bank, and drove directly back to the doctor’s, hitching his horse to the lamp-post. The office was a smaller portion of the house at one side, which Mauney approached. He rang the bell.

“Come in out of that!” immediately came the doctor’s heavy voice.

Mauney stepped into an office furnished with several leather chairs, a desk on which reposed a skull, a safe holding on its top a stuffed loon, an open bookcase filled with dusty volumes of various colors, and a phalanx of bottles against one wall from which radiated a strong odor of drugs. He looked about in vain for the doctor.

“Sit down, young fellow!” came a stern command from the adjoining surgery. In a moment or two the big physician bustled out, and, stopping in front of Mauney’s chair, stared down at him savagely as if he were the rankest intruder, meanwhile smoking furiously and surrounding himself with blue cigar smoke.

“Say!” he said, at length, jerking the cigar roughly from his mouth. “Who the devil are you?”