t, or tried to,"
continued Belle, laboring under evident excitement. "But it's no use
shutting our eyes any longer to facts. You're Barb Doubleday's
daughter and Barb Doubleday is making war all the time on my friends
and hiring men to assassinate them, and it doesn't seem right to me and
it won't to other people, me sheltering Barb Doubleday's daughter with
such things going on----"

"But, Belle----"

Belle raised her voice one key higher: "You needn't tell me, I know.
Now they're trying to murder Jim Laramie and they've close to done it,
this day----"

Belle had received and accepted strict injunctions of secrecy on the
next point she disclosed, but her feelings were not to be denied. And
she was not prepared for the question that Kate, stung by the
accusation, flung at her: "What do you mean?"

"I mean he's lying near here bleeding to death this minute and Doctor
Carpy in Medicine Bend."

In tones broken with anger and excitement, Belle told the disconnected
story as it had come to her in jerks and nods and oaths from McAlpin at
the barn, and in the little she had pulled out of Laramie himself when
she took food to him. Then came in terribly heated words the brunt of
her anger at Kate. "You knew," she said, pointing her finger at Kate,
standing stupefied. "You knew where Jim Laramie hid Hawk. Nobody else
did know--not even Lefever or Sawdy knew--I didn't know till you told
me. Now, after they've burned his cabin, they set a death watch there
at the bridge on Laramie. How did they know there was such a place if
you didn't tell 'em?"

Stunned by the fire of Belle's wrath, Kate, breathless, tried to
collect her senses. It was only her anger at the final implication
that cleared them. But even as her words of indignant denial reached
her lips, her utterance was paralyzed by the recollection that
unwittingly she had told her father of the night she was thrown into
Laramie's retreat. Yet even this did not check her resentment.

"Who accuses me of telling them?" she demanded. "Who says I conspired
to murder anyone--did Mr. Laramie say so?"

She shot the question at Belle in a furious tone. Her eyes flashed in
a way that confounded her accuser.

"I'm asking you how they found out," retorted Belle, but in spite of
herself on the defensive.

Kate's face was set and her eyes were on fire. All the anger that a
woman could feel centered in her words and manner. "Answer my question
before you say anot