t!"

"I pray to God it will burn up your wicked pride!"

"We believed him, mother and I believed him, in spite of what Chance
said. Oh, if you'd only come back then, Frances, this thing wouldn't
have happened!"

"I can't see what good that would have done," said Frances, wearily;
"there are others who don't believe him. They'd have got him some
time, just like they got him--in a coward's underhanded way, never
giving him a chance for his life."

"We went to Meander this morning thinking we'd catch father there
before he left. We wanted to tell him about Mr. Macdonald, and get him
to drop this feud. If we could have seen him I know he'd have done
what we asked, for he's got the noblest heart in the world!"

Whatever Frances felt on the noble nature of Saul Chadron she held
unexpressed. She did not feel that it fell to her duty to tell Nola
whose hand had struck Macdonald down, although she believed that the
cattleman's daughter deserved whatever pain and humiliation the
revelation might bring. For it was as plain as if Nola had confessed
it in words that she had much more than a friendly feeling of
gratitude for the foeman of her family.

Her heart was as unstable as mercury, it seemed. Frances despised her
for her fickleness, scorned her for the mean face of friendship over
the treachery of her soul. Not that she regretted Major King. Nola was
free to take him and make the most of him. But she was not to come in
as a wedge to rive her from this man.

Let her pay her debt of gratitude in something else than love. Living
or dead, Alan Macdonald was not for Nola Chadron. Her penance and her
tears, her meanings and sobs and her broken heart, even that, if it
should come, could not pay for the humiliation and the pain which that
house had brought upon him.

"When did it happen?" asked Nola, the gust of her weeping past.

"This morning, early."

"Who did it--how did it happen? You got away from Chance--you said it
wasn't Chance."

"We got away from that gang yesterday; this happened this morning,
miles from that place."

"Who was it? Why don't you tell me, Frances?"

They were standing at Macdonald's side. A little spurt of flame among
the ends of wood in the chimney threw a sudden illumination over them,
and played like water over a stone upon Macdonald's face, then sank
again, as if it had been plunged in ashes. Frances remained silent,
her vindictiveness, her hardness of heart, against this vacillating
gi