, taking up the reins. "Oh! I say, Kid, don't
tell anyone to-night. Keep the thing going; it would be a pity to spoil
their fun, you know. You can do this for me, can't you?"

"I can try," said The Kid, setting his teeth together.

He stood looking after them as they went up the trail in the moonlight
"Oh! this cursed country!" he groaned. "It's so far from any place.
He'll never see her again, I'm sure. Well, I must keep this thing going
as I promised. But some of the number I'll cut out, you can bet."

Straight on through the moonlight rode the two men, the one trying to
make real the words that marched with ceaseless tramp across his brain:
"Doctors hold out no hope of recovery." They seemed like words of fire
written across the prairie. The other, riding a little behind, except
where the trail grew difficult or indistinct, silent but alert for
opportunity to offer aid or show sympathy, governing carefully the pace
so that the best possible speed could be got out of the superb animals
that with their swinging lope covered the long slopes up and down. The
memory of that ride to Shock in after years was like that of a ghastly
nightmare, a strange intermingling of moonlight and shadow; the murmur
of the night wind about his ears; the steady beat of the hoofs upon the
beaten trail; the pause at midnight by the upper ford of the Black Dog
to feed and rest their horses; and then the steady onward push through
the night till the grey and gold of the eastern sky told that the
morning had come. He could never forget how the first beams of the
rising sun smote his eyes like the cut of a whip till he was almost
forced to cry out in his pain. He remembered how it seemed to him as if
he were in the grip of some mysterious force impelling him onward in
that unending, relentless lope. Another pause at sunrise to give the
horses breath, and then on again they rode through that terrible red
light of the rising sun, till at length in the still early forenoon the
manse of Big River was reached. Their horses were jaded and leg-weary,
for in the thirteen hours during which they had kept up their long,
swinging gait they had covered more than a hundred miles.

The McIntyres were expecting them.

"We want speak about his mother, dear," said the little woman of the
manse, with a warm feeling in her heart for the missionary who had
spent a night with them some seven months ago, and had told them so
simply and fully of his life, a story o