brilliant starlight at this hour; they could see the
gleam of the snow-peaks--the light was almost like the glow of the moon.

"There'll be plenty of sleep after to-morrow," added MacDonald, and there
was a finality in his voice and words which set the other's blood stirring.

"You think they will show up to-morrow?"

"Yes. This is the same valley the cabins are in, Johnny. That big mountain
runs out an' splits it, an' it curves like a horseshoe. From that mount'in
we can see them, no matter which way they come. They'll go straight to the
cabins. There's a deep little run under the slope. You didn't see it when
we came out, but it'll take us within a hunderd yards of 'em. An' at a
hunderd yards----"

He shrugged his shoulders suggestively in the starlight, and there was a
smile on his face.

"It seems almost like murder," shuddered Aldous.

"But it ain't,'" replied MacDonald quickly. "It's self-defence! If we
don't do it, Johnny--if we don't draw on them first, what happened there
forty years ago is goin' to happen again--with Joanne!"

"A hundred yards," breathed Aldous, his jaws setting hard. "And there are
five!"

"They'll go into the cabins," said MacDonald. "At some time there will be
two or three outside, an' we'll take them first. At the sound of the shots
the others will run out, and it will be easy. Yo' can't very well miss a
man at a hunderd yards, Johnny?"

"No, I won't miss."

MacDonald rose.

"I'm goin' to take a little stroll, Johnny."

For two hours after that Aldous was alone. He knew why old Donald could not
sleep, and where he had gone, and he pictured him sitting before the little
old cabin in the starlit valley communing with the spirit of Jane. And
during those two hours he steeled himself for the last time to the thing
that was going to happen when the day came.

It was nearly three o'clock when MacDonald returned. It was four o'clock
before he roused Joanne; and it was five o'clock when they had eaten their
breakfast, and MacDonald prepared to leave for the mountain with his
telescope. Aldous had observed Joanne talking to him for several minutes
alone, and he had also observed that her eyes were very bright, and that
there was an unusual eagerness in her manner of listening to what the old
man was saying. The significance of this did not occur to him when she
urged him to accompany MacDonald.

"Two pairs of eyes are better than one, John," she said, "and I cannot
possibly be in d