t pleasant enough for them on the veranda, where
they walked back and forth, making fair exchange of the exciting
experiences which had befallen them during their long separation.
Between the lines of these mutual recitals sweet, fresh echoes of the
old, old story went from heart to heart, an amoebaean love-bout like
that of spring birds calling tenderly back and forth in the blooming
Maytime woods.

Both Captain Helm and M. Roussillon were delighted to hear of
Long-Hair's capture and certain fate, but neither of them regarded the
news as of sufficient importance to need much comment. They did not
think of telling Beverley and Alice. Jean, however, lying awake in his
little bed, overheard the conversation, which he repeated to Alice next
morning with great circumstantiality.

Having the quick insight bred of frontier experience, Alice instantly
caught the terrible significance of the dilemma in which she and
Beverley would be placed by Long-Hair's situation. Moreover, something
in her heart arose with irresistible power demanding the final, the
absolute human sympathy and gratitude. No matter what deeds Long-Hair
had committed that were evil beyond forgiveness, he had done for her
the all-atoning thing. He had saved Beverley and sent him back to her.

With a start and a chill of dread, she thought: "What if it is already
too late!"

But her nature could not hesitate. To feel the demand of an exigency
was to act. She snatched a wrap from its peg on the wall and ran as
fast as she could to the fort. People who met her flying along
wondered, staring after her, what could be urging her so that she saw
nobody, checked herself for nothing, ran splashing through the puddles
in the street, gazing ahead of her, as if pursuing some flying object
from which she dared not turn her eyes.

And there was, indeed, a call for her utmost power of flight, if she
would be of any assistance to Long-Hair, who even then stood bound to a
stake in the fort's area, while a platoon of riflemen, those unerring
shots from Kentucky and Virginia, were ready to make a target of him at
a range of but twenty yards.

Beverley, greatly handicapped by the fact that the fresh scalp of a
white man hung at Long-Hair's belt, had exhausted every possible
argument to avert or mitigate the sentence promptly spoken by the court
martial of which Colonel Clark was the ruling spirit. He had succeeded
barely to the extent of turning the mode of execution from t