ng around her.

She whirled Snake on his hind feet, struck him sharply with the quirt
and was galloping back over the trail past the Hawkins house before
Senator Warfield had finished advising Hawkins. She saw Mrs Hawkins
standing in the door, staring at her, but she did not stop. They would
take her to the asylum; she felt that the Sawtooth had the power, that
she had played directly into their hands, and that they would be as
ruthless in dealing with her as they had been with the nesters whom
they had killed. She knew it, she had read it in the inscrutable,
level look of Senator Warfield, in the half cringing, wholly
subservient manner of Hawkins when he listened to his master.

"They're fiends!" she cried aloud once, while she urged Snake up the
slope of Granite Ridge. "I believe they'd kill me if they were sure
they could get away with it. But they could frame an insanity charge
and put me--my God, what fiends they are!"

At the Sawtooth, Senator Warfield was talking with Mrs Hawkins while
her husband saddled two horses. Mrs Hawkins lived within her four
walls and called that her "spere," and spoke of her husband as "he."
You know the type of woman. That Senator Warfield was anything less
than a godlike man who stood very high on the ladder of Fame, she would
never believe. So she related garrulously certain incoherent, aimless
utterances of Lorraine's, and cried a little, and thought it was
perfectly awful that a sweet, pretty girl like that should be crazy.
She would have made an ideal witness against Lorraine, her very
sympathy carrying conviction of Lorraine's need of it. That she did
not convince Senator Warfield of Lorraine's mental derangement was a
mere detail. Senator Warfield had reasons for knowing that Lorraine
was merely afflicted with a dangerous amount of knowledge and was using
it without discretion.

"You mustn't let her run loose and maybe kill herself or somebody
else!" Mrs Hawkins exclaimed. "Oh, Senator, it's awful to think of!
When she went past the house I knew the poor thing wasn't right----"

"We'll overtake her," Senator Warfield assured her comfortingly. "She
can't go very far on that horse. She'd ridden him half to death,
getting here. He won't hold out--he can't. She came here, I suppose,
because she had been here before. A sanitorium may be able to restore
her to a normal condition. I can't believe it's anything more than
some nervous disorder. Now don't worry, my