utside.

He heard a crash and rending of woodwork. He could see nothing. He
was incapable of further effort. The end had come all too soon. He
staggered blindly, helplessly. His tottering limbs gave under him.
Suffocation gripped him by the throat. He was conscious of the rush of
a figure toward him. The sound of his name shrieked in a woman's
voice. Then there were shots fired. He heard them. And it seemed
there were many of them, and the sound was blurred, and vague, and
distant from his ears. He fell. He knew he fell. For hours it seemed
to him he continued to fall in an abyss of blackness that was wholly
horrifying. It was a blackness peopled with hideous invisible shadows.
So impenetrable was the inky void that even sound had no place in it.

CHAPTER XXVI

UNDER THE VEIL

There was no moon. Only a starry sheen lit the night. A wonderful
peace had descended upon the hills. The quiet was the hush of the
still prairie night. Teeming maybe with restless life; but it was a
life invisible, and rarely audible. Nevertheless the hush was merely a
veil. A veil which concealed, but had no power to sweep away the
garnered harvest of violent human passions.

The figure of a man lay stretched upon his back on the bank of the
river. His head was carefully pillowed. A covering had been spread
over the upper body, as though to hide that which lay beneath, rather
than yield warmth and comfort on the summer night. The covering was a
coat, a woman's coat, and the owner of it sat crouching over her charge.

Nan stirred. She reached out and tucked the long skirts of the coat
under the man's shoulders with that mother instinct at once so
solicitous, so tender. She shifted her position which had become
cramped with her long vigil. These were moments of darkness, literal
and mental. Her anxiety and dread were almost overwhelming. The
waiting seemed interminable.

She raised her eyes from her yearning regard of the still, bandaged
head with its pale features. She sighed, as she turned them in another
direction, toward an object lying beneath the shadow of a great red
willow near by. It was a dark object, huddled and, like the other,
quite still. A curious sort of fascination held her for some moments,
then, almost reluctantly, as though impelled by the trend of her
feelings, her gaze wandered in the direction whence was wafted toward
her a pungent reek of burning. It was the dimly outlined skele