m this time. The other one's lit out," he said.

Miss Schuyler shuddered, and clutched at the table, while, though Hetty
was very still, she fancied she heard a stifled gasp. The silence was even
more disconcerting than the pounding of the axes or the crash of the
firing. Flora Schuyler could see the shadowy figures about the window, and
just distinguish some of them. The one standing close in front of it, as
though disdainful of the risk he ran, was Torrance; the other, who now and
then moved lithely, and once rested a rifle on the sill, was Clavering;
another, the man who had fired the last shot; but the rest were blurred,
formless objects, a little darker than the cedar panelling. Now and then
the streak of radiance widened behind the box, and the cold grew numbing
as the icy wind flowed in.

Suddenly a voice rose up outside. "You can't keep us out, Torrance. We're
bound to get in; but I'll try to hold the boys now if you'll let us have
our wounded man, and light out quietly."

Torrance laughed. "You are not making much of a show, and I'm quite ready
to do the best I can," he said. "If there's any life in him we want your
man for the Sheriff."

Then he turned to the others. "I was 'most forgetting the fellow outside
there. We'll hold them off from the window while you bring him in."

It appeared horribly risky, but Torrance spoke with a curious
unconcernedness, and Clavering laughed as, signing to two men, he prepared
to do his bidding. There was a creaking and rattling, and the great door
at one end of the hall swung open, and Flora Schuyler, staring at the
darkness, expected to see a rush of shadowy figures out of it. But she saw
only the blurred outline of two men who stooped and dragged something in,
and then the door swung to again.

They lifted their burden higher. Torrance, approaching the table, took up
the lamp, and Miss Schuyler had a passing glimpse of a hanging head and a
drawn grey face as they tramped past her heavily. She opened her blue lips
and closed them again, for she was dazed with cold, and the cry that would
have been a relief to her never came. It was several minutes later when
Torrance's voice rose from by the stove.

"We'll leave him here in the meanwhile, where he can't freeze," he said.
"Shot right through the shoulder, but there's no great bleeding. The cold
would stop it."

Hetty was at her father's side the next moment. "Flo," she said, "we have
to do something now."

Torrance