hed its end, "I couldn't nuther love ye
ner esteem ye. Ye tuck blame on yoreself ter save a woman."

For a time she sat there gazing out through the window, her thoughts
busy with the grim game in which this man whom she loved had been so
desperately involved. She knew that he had spoken the whole truth ...
but she knew, too, that over them both must hang the unending shadow of
a threat, and after a little she acknowledged that realization as she
said with a new note of determination in her voice:

"Thar hain't no p'int in our waitin' over-long ter be wedded. Folks thet
faces perils like we does air right wise ter git what they kin outen
life--whilst they kin."

"We kain't be wedded none too soon fer me," he declared with fervour.
"Albeit yore grandpap's got ter be won over fust. He's right steadfast
to Bas Rowlett, I reckon."

As anxiously as Dorothy followed the rise and fall in the tide of her
lover's strength it is doubtful if her anxiety was keener than that of
Bas Rowlett, who began to feel that he had been cheated.

Unless something unforeseen altered the trend of his improvement, Cal
Maggard would recover. He would not keep his oath to avenge his
way-laying before the next full moon because it would require other
weeks to restore his whole strength and give back to him the use of his
gun hand, but the essential fact remained that he would not die.

Bas had entered into a compact based upon his belief that the other
_would_ die--a compact which as the days passed became a thing concrete
enough and actual enough to take reckoning of.

Of course Bas meant to kill his enemy. As matters now stood he must kill
him--but he would only enhance his own peril by seeking to forestall the
day when his agreement left him free to act.

So Bas still came to inquire with the solicitude of seeming friendship,
but outside that house he was busy breathing life into a scheme of broad
and parlous scope, and in all but a literal sense that scheme was a
violation of his oath-bound compact.

It was when Cal sat propped against pillows in a rocking chair, with his
right arm in a splint, and old Caleb smoked his pipe on the other side
of the window, that Dorothy suddenly went over and standing by Maggard,
laid her arm across his shoulders.

"Gran'pap," she said with a steadiness that hid its underlying
trepidation, "Cal an' me aims ter wed ... an' we seeks yore blessin'."

The old mountaineer sat up as though an explosion had