wered nothing. Black Bart came and crouched at his head
and stared at her fixedly.

"Speak to me!"

Only the yellow light answered her. Cold fear fought in her heart, but
love still struggled against it.

"For the last time--for God's sake, Dan!"

Still that silence. She rose, shaking and weak. The changeless eyes
followed her. Only fear remained now. She backed towards the door,
slowly, then faster, and faster. At the threshold she whirled and
plunged into the night.

Up the road she raced. Once she stumbled and fell to her knees. She
cried out and glanced behind her, breathing again when she saw that
nothing followed. At the house she made no pause, though she heard the
voice of her father singing. She could not tell him. He should be the
last in all the world to know. She went to her room and huddled into
bed.

Presently a knock came at her door, and her father's voice asked if
she were ill. She pleaded that she had a bad headache and wished to be
alone. He asked if she had seen Dan. By a great effort she managed to
reply that Dan had ridden to a neighbouring ranch. Her father left
the door without further question. Afterwards she heard him in the
distance singing his favourite mournful ballads. It doubled her sense
of woe and brought home the clinging fear. She felt that if she could
weep she might live, but otherwise her heart would burst. And after
hours and hours of that torture which burns the name of "woman" in the
soul of a girl, the tears came. The roosters announced the dawn before
she slept.

Late the next morning old Joe Cumberland knocked again at her door. He
was beginning to fear that this illness might be serious. Moreover, he
had a definite purpose in rousing her.

"Yes?" she called, after the second knock.

"Look out your window, honey, down to Morgan's place. You remember I
said I was goin' to clean up the landscape?"

The mention of Morgan's place cleared the sleep from Kate's mind and
it brought back the horror of the night before. Shivering she slipped
from her bed and went to the window. Morgan's place was a mass of
towering flames!

She grasped the window-sill and stared again. It could not be. It must
be merely another part of the nightmare, and no reality. Her father's
voice, high with exultation, came dimly to her ears, but what she saw
was Dan as he had laid there the night before, hurt, helpless, too
weak to move!

"There's the end of it," Joe Cumberland was saying complac