f from his neck, when Mazarine came up.

"What's that on your coat and breeches? Say, you're all bloody!"
exclaimed Mazarine. "Why, they shot you!"

"Yes, they got me," was Orlando's husky reply, and he gave a funny
little laugh. Giggling, people had called it.

"How are we going to get you home?" Mazarine asked. "You can't ride."

At that moment there was the rumbling jolt of a wagon. It was the
pioneer-emigrant returning from Askatoon to his camp.

A few minutes later Orlando was lying on some bags in the emigrant's
wagon, while Mazarine rode beside it. "It's only a few hundred yards to
the house," said the emigrant sympathetically, as he looked down at the
now unconscious figure in the wagon.

"It's four miles to his house," said Mazarine. "Well, I'm not taking him
four miles to his house or any house," said the emigrant. "My horse has
had enough to-day, and the sooner the lad's attended to, the better.
He's going to the nearest house, and that's Tralee, as they call it,
just here."

"That's my house," gruffly replied the old man. "Well, that's where
you want him to go, ain't it?" asked the pioneer sharply. He could not
understand the owner of Tralee.

"Yes, that's where I want him to go," replied Mazarine slowly.

"Then you ride ahead on the trail, and I'll follow," returned the other
decisively.

"What's the matter? Who hurt him?" he presently called to Mazarine,
riding in front.

"I'll tell you when we get to Tralee," answered the old man, with his
eyes fixed on two lights in the near distance. One was in the kitchen,
where a half-breed woman was giving supper to Li Choo, a faithful
Chinaman roustabout; the other was in the room where a young wife sat
with hands clasped, wondering why her husband did not return, yet glad
that he did not.

CHAPTER VI. "THINGS MUST HAPPEN"

Between two sunrises Louise Mazarine had seen her old world pass in
a flash of flame and a new world trembling with a new life spread out
before her; had come to know what her old world really was. The eyes
with which she looked upon her new world had in them the glimmer not
only of awakened feeling but of awakened understanding. To this time she
had endured her aged husband as a slave comes to bear the lashes of his
master, with pain which will be renewed and renewed, but pain only, and
not the deeper torture of the soul; for she had never really grasped
what their relations meant. To her it had all been part of the
unavoi