is eyes grew shot with blood.
Standing carefully so as to obstruct her view, he caught at the corner
of an elk hide and threw it over Pierre. Then he went to Joan, who
stared at him, white and shaking. He put his arm around her and drew
her out, shutting the door of her home and leaning against it.

"You can't go back," said he gently and reasonably. "The man tried to
kill you. You can't go back. Surely you meant to go away."

"Yes," said Joan, "yes. I did mean to go away. But--but it's Pierre."

He bent and began to strap on her snowshoes. There was a fighting
brilliance in his eyes and a strange look of hurry about him that had
its effect on Joan. "It's Pierre no longer," said he. "What can you do
for him? What can he do for you? Be sensible, child. Come. Don't waste
time. There will be snow to-day."

In fact it was to-day. The moon had set and a gray dawn possessed the
world. It was not nearly so cold and the great range had vanished in a
bank of gray-black clouds moving steadily northward under a damp wind.
Joan looked at this one living creature with wide, fever-brightened
eyes.

"Come," said the man impatiently.

Joan bent her head and followed him across the snow.

CHAPTER VIII

DELIRIUM

It is not the people that have led still and uneventful lives who are
best prepared for emergencies. They are not trained to face crises, to
make prompt and just decisions. Joan had made but two such resolutions
in her life; the first when she had followed Pierre, the second when
she had kept Holliwell's books in defiance of her husband's jealousy.
The leaving her father had been the result of long and painful
thought. Now, in a few hours, events had crashed about her so that her
whole life, outer and inner, had been shattered. Beyond the pain and
fever of her wound there was an utter confusion of her faculties.
Before she fainted she had, indeed, made a distinct resolve to leave
Pierre. It was this purpose, working subconsciously on her will, as
much as the urgent pressure of the stranger, that took her past
Pierre's body out into the dawn and sent her on that rash journey of
hers in the footsteps of an unknown man. This being seemed to her then
hardly human. Mysteriously he had stepped in out of the night,
mysteriously he had condemned Pierre, and in self-defense, for Joan
had seen Pierre draw his gun and fire, he had killed her husband. Now,
just as mysteriously, as inevitably it seemed to her, he took comm