nly gazing at him with starting eyes.

"A traitor to us, and Ben's squaw!" He turned fiercely to Chan. "I guess
that gives us right to do what we want to with her. And now she can yell
if she wants to for her lover to come and save her."

She did not even try to buy their mercy by informing them where they
might find Ben. Only too well she knew that their dreadful intentions
could not be turned aside: she would only sacrifice Ben without aiding
herself. Ray moved toward her, his eyes deeply sunken, the pupils
abnormally enlarged.

"You haven't lost all your looks," he told her breathlessly. "That mouth
is still pretty enough to kiss. And I guess you won't slap--this time--"

He drew her toward him, his dark face lowering toward hers. She
struggled, trying to wrench away from him. Helpless and alone, the
moment of final horror was at hand. In this last instant her whole being
leaped again to Ben,--the man whose strength had been her fort
throughout all their first weeks in the wilds, but whom she had left
helpless and sick in the distant cavern. Yet even now he would rise and
come to her if he knew of her peril. Her voice rose shrilly to a scream.
"Ben--help me!"

And Ray's hands fell from her shoulders as he heard the incredible
answer from the shore of the lake. The brush rustled and cracked: there
was a strange sound of a heavy footfall,--slow, unsteady, but
approaching them as certain as the speeding stars approach their
mysterious destinations in the far reaches of the sky. Ray
straightened, staring; Chan stood as if frozen, his hands half-raised,
his eyes wide open.

"I'm coming, Beatrice," some one said in the coverts. Her cries, uttered
when her father fell, had not gone unheard. In the last stages of
exhaustion, deathly pale yet with a face of iron, Ben came reeling
toward them out of the moonlight.

XLII

Ben walked quietly into the circle of firelight and stood at Beatrice's
side. But while Ray and Chan gazed at him as if he were a spectre from
the grave, Beatrice's only impulse was one of immeasurable and
unspeakable thankfulness. No fate on earth was so dreadful but that it
would be somewhat alleviated by the fact of his presence: just the sight
of him, standing beside her, put her in some vague way out of Ray's
power to harm. Exhausted, reeling, he was still the prop of her life and
hope.

"Here I am," he said quietly. "The letter's in my pocket. Do what you
want with me--but let Beatrice