must pass into the open, and there was absolute stillness as
Laura advanced. Their work was to come--quiet and swift and sure; but not
yet.

Only one face Laura saw as she led the way to the moment's safety--Tim
Denton's; and it was as stricken as her own. She passed, then turned and
looked at him again. He understood; she wanted him.

He waited till she sprang into her wagon, after the Healer had mounted his
mule and ridden away with ever-quickening pace into the prairie. Then he
turned to the set, fierce men beside him.

"Leave him alone," he said--"leave him to me. I know him. You hear? Ain't
I no rights? I tell you I knew him--South. You leave him to me."

They nodded, and he sprang into his saddle and rode away. They watched the
figure of the Healer growing smaller in the dusty distance.

"Tim'll go to her," one said, "and perhaps they'll let the snake get off.
Hadn't we best make sure?"

"Perhaps you'd better let him vamoose," said Flood Rawley, anxiously.
"Jansen is a law-abiding place."

The reply was decisive. Jansen had its honor to keep. It was the home of
the Pioneers--Laura Sloly was a Pioneer.

* * * * *

Tim Denton was a Pioneer, with all the comradeship which lay in the word,
and he was that sort of lover who has seen one woman and can never see
another--not the product of the most modern civilization. Before Laura had
had Playmates he had given all he had to give; he had waited and hoped
ever since; and when the ruthless gossips had said to him before Mary
Jewell's house that she was in love with the Faith Healer, nothing changed
in him. For the man--for Ingles--Tim belonged to a primitive breed, and
love was not in his heart. As he rode out to Sloly's Ranch, he ground his
teeth in rage. But Laura had called him to her, and--

"Well, what you say goes, Laura," he muttered at the end of a long hour of
human passion and its repression. "If he's to go scot-free, then he's got
to go; but the boys yonder'll drop on me if he gets away. Can't you see
what a swab he is, Laura?"

The brown eyes of the girl looked at him gently. The struggle between them
was over; she had had her way--to save the preacher, impostor though he
was; and now she felt, as she had never felt before in the same fashion,
that this man was a man of men.

"Tim, you do not understand," she urged. "You say he was a landsharp in
the South, and that he had to leave--"

"He had to vamoos