lowly and deliberately.
He watched it, fascinated. And the look in Graham's face was the cold
and unexcited triumph of a devil. Stampede saw only that face. It was
four inches--perhaps five--away from the girl's. There was only
that--and the extending arm, the crooking finger, the black mouth of the
automatic seeking his heart. And then, in that last second, straight
into the girl's staring eyes blazed Stampede's gun, and the four inches
of leering face behind her was suddenly blotted out. It was Stampede,
and not the girl, who closed his eyes then; and when he opened them and
saw Mary Standish sobbing over Alan's body, and Graham lying face down
in the sand, he reverently raised the gun from which he had fired the
last shot, and pressed its hot barrel to his thin lips.

Then he went to Alan. He raised the limp head, while Mary bowed her face
in her hands. In her anguish she prayed that she, too, might die, for in
this hour of triumph over Graham there was no hope or joy for her. Alan
was gone. Only death could have come with that terrible red blot on his
forehead, just under the gray streak in his hair. And without him there
was no longer a reason for her to live.

She reached out her arms. "Give him to me," she whispered. "Give him to
me."

Through the agony that burned in her eyes she did not see the look in
Stampede's face. But she heard his voice.

"It wasn't a bullet that hit him," Stampede was saying. "The bullet hit
a rock, an' it was a chip from the rock that caught him square between
the eyes. He isn't dead, _and he ain't going to die!_"

How many weeks or months or years it was after his last memory of the
fairies' hiding-place before he came back to life, Alan could make no
manner of guess. But he did know that for a long, long time he was
riding through space on a soft, white cloud, vainly trying to overtake a
girl with streaming hair who fled on another cloud ahead of him; and at
last this cloud broke up, like a great cake of ice, and the girl plunged
into the immeasurable depths over which they were sailing, and he leaped
after her. Then came strange lights, and darkness, and sounds like the
clashing of cymbals, and voices; and after those things a long sleep,
from which he opened his eyes to find himself in a bed, and a face very
near, with shining eyes that looked at him through a sea of tears.

And a voice whispered to him, sweetly, softly, joyously, "Alan!"

He tried to reach up his arms. The f