Demorest descended like a flash of lightning. There was no outcry.
Even in that supreme moment Demorest felt a pang of admiration for
the stoicism of the unseen trespasser. But the maimed hand was quickly
withdrawn, and as quickly Demorest rushed to the door and dashed into
the outer darkness.

For an instant he was dazed and bewildered by the sudden change. But the
next moment he saw a dodging, doubling figure running before him, and
threw himself upon it. In the shock both men fell, but even in that
contact Demorest felt the tangled beard and alcoholic fumes of Whiskey
Dick, and felt also that the hands which were thrown up against his
breast, the palms turned outward with the instinctive movement of a
timid, defenseless man, were unstained with soil or blood. With an oath
he threw the drunkard from him and dashed to the rear of the cabin.
But too late! There, indeed, was the scattered earth, there the widened
burrow as it had been excavated apparently by that mutilated hand--but
nothing else!

He turned back to Whiskey Dick. But the miserable man, although still
retaining a look of dazed terror in his eyes, had recovered his feet
in a kind of angry confidence and a forced sense of injury. What did
Demorest mean by attacking "innoshent" gentlemen on the trail outside
his cabin? Yes! OUTSIDE his cabin, he would swear it!

"What were you doing here at midnight?" demanded Demorest.

What was he doing? What was any gentleman doing? He wasn't any
molly-coddle to go to bed at ten o'clock! What was he doing? Well--he'd
been with men who didn't shut their doors and turn the boys out just
in the shank of the evening. He wasn't any Barker to be wet-nursed by
Demorest.

"Some one else was here!" said Demorest sternly, with his eyes fixed on
Whiskey Dick. The dull glaze which seemed to veil the outer world from
the drunkard's pupils shifted suddenly with such a look of direct horror
that Demorest was fain to turn away his own. But the veil mercifully
returned, and with it Dick's worked-up sense of injury. Nobody was
there--not "a shole." Did Demorest think if there had been any of
his friends there they would have stood by like "dogsh" and seen him
insulted?

Demorest turned away and re-entered the cabin as Dick lurched heavily
forward, still muttering, down the trail. The excitement over, a
sickening repugnance to the whole incident took the place of Demorest's
resentment and indignation. There had been a cowardly attempt