high tide when Farnsworth, who always slept with
an ear open, reached Roussillon place and quickly quieted things. He
was troubled beyond expression when he found out the true state of the
affair, for there was nothing that he could do but arrest Alice and
take her to Hamilton. It made his heart sink. He would have thought
little of ordering a file of soldiers to shoot a man under the same
conditions; but to subject her again to the Governor's stern
cruelty--how could he do it? This time there would be no hope for her.

Alice stood before him flushed, disheveled, defiant, sword in hand,
beautiful and terrible as an angel. The black figure, man or devil, had
disappeared as strangely as it had come. The sub-Lieutenant was having
his slight wound bandaged. Men were raging and cursing under their
breath, rubbing their bruised heads and limbs.

"Alice--Mademoiselle Roussillon, I am so sorry for this," said Captain
Farnsworth. "It is painful, terrible--"

He could not go on, but stood before her unmanned. In the feeble light
his face was wan and his hurt shoulder, still in bandages, drooped
perceptibly.

"I surrender to you," she presently said in French, extending the hilt
of her rapier to him. "I had to defend myself when attacked by your
Lieutenant there. If an officer finds it necessary to set upon a girl
with his sword, may not the girl guard her life if she can?"

She was short of breath, so that her voice palpitated with a touching
plangency that shook the man's heart.

Farnsworth accepted the sword; he could do nothing less. His duty
admitted of no doubtful consideration; yet he hesitated, feeling around
in his mind for a phrase with which to evade the inevitable.

"It will be safer for you at the fort, Mademoiselle; let me take you
there."

CHAPTER XIII

A MEETING IN THE WILDERNESS

Beverley set out on his mid-winter journey to Kaskaskia with a tempest
in his heart, and it was, perhaps, the storm's energy that gave him the
courage to face undaunted and undoubting what his experience must have
told him lay in his path. He was young and strong; that meant a great
deal; he had taken the desperate chances of Indian warfare many times
before this, and the danger counted as nothing, save that it offered
the possibility of preventing him from doing the one thing in life he
now cared to do. What meant suffering to him, if he could but rescue
Alice? And what were life should he fail to rescue her? The old,