nd caught
her wrist with his vice-like fingers.

"Ho, Leon!" he yelled; "coom quick, and bring ze rope!"

It was a wonderful change that had come over the cross-eyed
one. A few minutes before and he had been an abject
coward; now he was the blustering bully and villain, with
his worst passions roused, and ready to take any risks
to gratify his thirst for revenge.

As for Dorothy, she saw the futility of struggling, and
lay still. What could have happened to her father and
Jacques that they did not come up? Surely they must be
near at hand. Was God going to allow these men, whose
lives she and her father had spared, to prevail? She did
not doubt that they meant to put her cruelly to death.
She breathed a prayer for Divine aid, and had a strange
presentiment that she was to be helped in some mysterious
way.

In a minute or two Leon was also upon the roof. In his
hand he held some strips of undressed buck-skin and a
jack-knife. He seemed to have forgotten all about his
late peril in the paramount question of how they were to
revenge themselves upon the girl who a short time before
had outwitted them. The cross-eyed one hated her because
she had rapped him over the knuckles and given him a bad
five minutes when she had possession of the gun. Leon
was furious because she had brought about his introduction
to Bruin so cleverly, and given him beyond doubt the
worst ten minutes he ever had in his life. Like most
gentlemen of their stamp, they quite lost sight of the
fact that they themselves had been the aggressors, and
that, had it not been for the girl's goodness of heart,
they would in all probability have both been killed.

Perhaps the strangest feature of the situation to Dorothy
was that Leon did not seem to resent his worthy mate's
late secession from the path of loyalty, or, to put it
more plainly, his cold-bloodedness in laying him the odds
in favour of the bear. Probably they knew each other so
well and were so accustomed to be kicked when down that
Leon took the affair as a matter of course. Dorothy
rightly concluded, however, that this seeming indifference
was merely the outcome of the cunning half-breed nature,
which never forgot an insult and never repaid it until
the handle end of the whip was assured.

The first thing that the two villains proceeded to do
was to tie Dorothy's hands, not too closely, however,
behind her back. It was useless to attempt resistance,
as they were both powerful men, and