was tryin' to cotton up to her on the landin' about the
Eatin'-House, an' she----"

"You lie!"

This was Barbara. Pale, her eyes flashing with indignation, she stepped
down into the street, standing near Harlan.

"That man," Barbara went on, pointing to the red-faced pursuer, "told me
early this morning that Luke Deveny had told him to watch me, that I was
not to leave my room until Deveny came for me. I was a prisoner. He
didn't try to make love to me. I should have killed him."

Speech had broken the tension under which Barbara had been laboring; the
flow of words through her lips stimulated her thoughts and sent them
skittering back to the salient incidents of her enforced confinement;
they brought into her consciousness a recollection of the conversation
she had heard between Meeder Lawson and Strom Rogers, regarding her
father. She forgot Harlan, Deveny, and the others, and ran to Sheriff
Gage.

Gage, a tall, slender man of forty, was pale and uncomfortable as he
looked down at the girl's white, upturned face. He shrank from the
frenzied appeal of her eyes, and he endured the pain of her tightly
gripping fingers on the flesh of his arms without flinching.

"Did--is father _dead_!"

She waited, frantically shaking Gage. And Gage did not answer until his
gaze had roamed the crowd.

Then he said slowly and reluctantly:

"I reckon he's dead. Deveny was tellin' me--he was chargin' this man,
Harlan, with killin' your father."

Barbara wheeled and faced Deveny. Rage, furious and passionate, had
overwhelmed the grief she felt over the death of her father. The shock
had been tremendous, but it had come while she had been leaning out of
the window listening to Rogers and Lawson--when she had lain for many
minutes unconscious on the floor of the room. Therefore the emotion she
experienced now was not entirely grief, it was rather a frantic yearning
to punish the men who had killed her father.

"You charged this man with murdering my father?" she demanded of Deveny
as she walked to him and stood, her hands clenched, her face dead white
and her eyes blazing hate. "You know better. I heard Strom Rogers tell
Meeder Lawson that it was Dolver and Laskar and somebody he called the
'Chief,' who did it. I want to know who those men are; I want to know
where I can find them! I want you to tell me!"

"You're unstrung, Barbara," said Deveny slowly, coolly, a faint smile on
his face. "I know nothing about it. I merely repea