filled the pocket of his trousers, caught up every stray
stone and pocketed them.

"You gendarme," he cried in a menacing voice, "you think you shall
follow in my tack. Yes? I blow your damn head off if you stir before
the hour. ... After that -- well, follow and be damn!"

Even as he spoke he stepped outside and slammed the door; and Darragh
and Stormont leaped for it. Then the lout detonation of Quintana's
rifle was echoed by the splintered rip of bullets tearing through the
closed door; and both men halted in the face of the leaden hail.

Eve ran to the pantry window and saw Quintana in somebody's stolen
lumber-sledge, lash a big pair of horses to a gallop and go floundering
past into the Ghost Lake road.

As he sped by in a whirl of snow he fired five times at the house, then,
rising and swinging his whip, he flogged the frantic horses into the
woods.

In the dining room, Stormont, red with rage and shame, and having found
his rifle in the corridor outside Eve's bedroom, was trying to open the
shutters for a shot; and Darragh, empty-handed, searched the house
frantically for a weapon.

Eve, terribly excited, came from the pantry:

"He's gone!" she cried furiously. "He's in somebody's lumber-sledge
with a pair of horses and he's driving west like the devil!"

Stormont ran to the tap-room telephone, cranked it, and warned the
constabulary at Five Lakes.

"Good God!" he exclaimed, turning to Darragh, scarlet with
mortification, "what a ghastly business! I never dreamed he was within
miles of Clinch's! It's the most shameful thing that ever happened to
me----"

"What could anybody do under that rifle?" said Eve hotly. "That beat
would have murdered the first person who stirred!"

Darragh, exasperated and dreadfully humiliated, looked miserably at his
brand-new wife.

Eve and Stormont also looked at her. She had come forward from the rear
of the stairway where Quintana had brutally driven her. Now she stood
with one hand on the empty leather jewel case, looking at everybody out
of pretty, bewildered eyes.

To Darragh, in a perplexed, unsteady voice: "Is it the same bandit who
robbed us before?"

"Yes; Quintana," he said wretchedly. Rage began to redden his features.
"Ricca," he said, "I promised I'd find your jewels. ... I promise you
again that I'll never drop this business until your gems -- and the
Flaming Jewel -- are in your possession----"

"But, Jim----"

"I swear it!" he exclaimed