what she
is after . . ."

"Ernestine!" he commanded harshly. "If I can help you, let me do it.
If I can't, I'll go. In either case we'll not talk of Miss Bellaire."

She looked at him curiously, studying him, seeming for an instant to
have grown quiet in mind as in body.

"She doesn't love you," she said calmly. "Not as I love you, Dave. If
she did . . . nothing would matter. She's got baby eyes and a baby
face . . . and she runs with men like Sefton and Lemarc!"

"I tell you," he cried sternly, "I'll not listen to you talk of her.
If I can't help you . . ."

Her eyes shone hard upon his. Then her head dropped again and once
more she was moaning as when he had first heard her, moaning and
weeping, her body twisting. Again the man was all uncertainty.

"You would do anything for her!" she cried brokenly. "You would do
nothing for me."

"I would do anything for you that you would let me and that I could do,
Ernestine," he said gently.

"And," she went on, unheeding, "it is because of you that I am like
this to-night!"

"Because of me?" wonderingly.

"Yes," with a fierce sob. "Because he knew I loved you. . . . I would
not have shot you that night at Pere Marquette's if I hadn't loved you!
. . . Do you think a woman is made like a man? . . . George has done
this! If he laid hands upon her, upon your holy lady I'm not to talk
about . . ."

"Tell me about it," he commanded. "Has Kootanie George done this to
you?"

"Dave!" Suddenly she had flung up her arms, staring at him strangely.
"Do you think I am dying? He hurt me here . . . and here . . . and
here." Her hands fluttered about her body, touching her throat, her
breast, her side. The hands, lowered a moment were again lifted,
stretched upward toward him, her eyes pleading with him. Slowly she
was sinking back; he thought that in truth the woman was dying or at
the least losing consciousness.

"Can't you help me?" she moaned. "Won't you hold me . . . I am
falling. . . ."

Upon his knees he slipped his arms about her. He felt a hard
stiffening of the muscles of her body, then a slow relaxing. He was
laying her back gently, when she shook her head.

"Hold me up," she whispered, the words faint though her lips were close
to his ear. "I'd smother if I lay down. . . ."

So he held her for a long time, fearing for her, at loss for a thing to
do. The flickering firelight showed his face troubled and solicitous,
hers half smiling no