they prepared to remove Dorothy from the roof,
and take her inside the hut. Leon was to descend first,
and then Lucien was to make her jump into the snowdrift,
where she would stick, and Leon would be waiting for her.

Poor Dorothy knew that if help did not come speedily she
would be undone. She prayed for Divine aid. She could
not believe that God would look down from Heaven and see
these fiends prevail. God's ways, she was aware, were
sometimes inscrutable, and seemed to fall short of justice,
but she knew that sooner or later they invariably worked
out retributive justice more terrible than man's. This
was to be made plain to her sooner than she imagined,
and unexpectedly, as God's ways occasionally are.

Leon descended, and his comrade, with an evil light in
his eyes and an oath on his lips, came towards Dorothy
to force her to jump on to the snowdrift; but villain
number two stopped him.

"Ze gun, Lucien," he said, "hand me ze gun first time."

The half-breed grasped the Winchester by the barrel and
handed it down to his comrade, but as he did so he was
unaware of the fact that the lever, in pumping up a fresh
cartridge, had also put the weapon on full cock. Leon,
in grasping it, did so clumsily, and inadvertently touched
the trigger. In an instant the death-fire spurted from
the muzzle, and Lucien fell forward with a bullet through
his brain.

Not always slow are the ways of Him Who said, "Vengeance
is Mine."

The girl sank back in horror at the sight. To see a man
sent to his account red-handed is a terrible thing.

The fatal shot was still ringing in her ears when another
sound broke in upon the reverberating air. It was the
muffled drumming of hoofs and the hurried exclamations
of voices which she recognised. It was her father and
the others returning with the horses. She staggered to
her feet again as best she could, for her hands, being
tied behind her back, made rising a difficult matter.
She must have presented a strange sight to the party,
bound as she was, and with her long hair streaming behind
her. She heard her father's cry of apprehension, and the
next moment she caught sight of the remaining rebel
scuttling like a startled iguana towards the dense
plantation, where it would have been quite possible for
him to have eluded pursuit. But before he reached it
there was a sharp ping. He threw up his hands and fell
dead on his face. Douglas had made sure of him.

"It's all right, dad, and