m glad Father Adam saved me from doing it.
He was Laval--Arden Laval, one of the Skandinavia's camp-bosses. Well, I
saw him killed on that trip, and I helped bury him in the snow. Gouter
drew on him on the dead run at fifty yards. He dropped him cold, and
wrecked the outfit the feller was driving. There were two in the bunch
that the Skandinavia sent there to raise trouble for us. Laval and
another. Laval's dead, and the other we brought right along as prisoner.
That other's here in this--"

A light knock interrupted the story. Bull turned with a start. Then he
sprang to his feet, every sign of weariness gone. He stood for a moment
as though in doubt. And the lumberman, watching him, remarked the
complete transformation that had taken place. He was smiling. His
straining eyes had softened to a tenderness the onlooker failed to
understand.

He moved swiftly across the room and flung open the door.

"Will you come right in?"

The lumberman heard the invitation. The tone was deep with a gentleness
he had never before discovered in it. And in his wonder he craned to see
who it was who had inspired it.

Bull moved aside.

It was then that Bat started up from his chair, and a sharp ejaculation
broke from him. Nancy McDonald was standing framed in the doorway.

CHAPTER XXIII

NANCY

Bat was hurrying down the woodland trail. For once in his hard life he
knew the meaning of rank cowardice. The sight of Nancy McDonald had
completely robbed him of the last vestige of courage. The atmosphere of
the office, that room so crowded with absorbing memories for him, had
suddenly seemed to threaten suffocation. He felt he must get out. He
must seek the cold, crisp air of the world he knew and understood. So he
had fled.

Now he was alone with a riot of thought that was almost chaotic. There
was only one thing that stood out clearly, definitely, in his mind. It
was the Nemesis of the thing that had happened. It was Nemesis with a
vengeance.

His busy jaws worked furiously under his emotion. He spat, and spat
again, into the soft white snow. Once he stopped abruptly and gazed back
over the circuitous trail. It was as though he must look again upon the
thing that had so deeply stirred him, as though he must look upon it to
reassure himself that he was not dreaming. That the thing had driven him
headlong was real, and not some troublesome hallucination.

Nancy McDonald! The beautiful stepdaughter of Leslie Standing, wit