last, and went out.

"There!" she muttered aggrievedly--"that's Alf Leek, just as he always
was. Give him a chance, and he'd ride over any one; but get the upper hand
of him, and he is meeker than Moses. Not that much meekness is needed to
come up to Moses, either." Then, after an impatient tattoo, she
exclaimed:

"Gracious me! I do wish he hadn't looked so crushed, and had talked back a
little."

CHAPTER XXII.

THE MURDER.

That evening, as the dusk fell, a slight figure in an Indian dress slipped
to the low brush back of the cabin, and thence to the uplands.

It was 'Tana, ready to endure all the wilds of the woods, rather than stay
there and meet again the man she had met the night before. She had sent
the squaw away; she had arranged in Mrs. Huzzard's tent a little game of
cards that would hold the attention of Lyster and the others; and then she
had slipped away, that she might, for just once more, feel free on the
mountain, as she had felt when they first located their camp in the sweet
grass of the Twin Springs.

The moon would be up after a while. She could not walk far, but she meant
to sit somewhere up there in the high ground until the moon should roll up
over the far mountains.

The mere wearing of the Indian dress gave her a feeling of being herself
once more, for in the pretty conventional dress made for her by Mrs.
Huzzard, she felt like another girl--a girl she did not know very well.

In the southwest long streaks of red and yellow lay across the sky, and a
clear radiance filled the air, as it does when a new moon is born after
the darkness. She felt the beauty of it all, and stretched out her arms as
though to draw the peaks of the hills to her.

But, as she stepped forward, a form arose before her--a tall, decided
form, and a decided voice said:

"No, 'Tana, you have gone far enough."

"Dan!"

"Yes--it is Dan this time, and not the other fellow. If he is waiting for
you to-night, I will see that he waits a long time."

"You--you!" she murmured, and stepped back from him. Then, her first
fright over, she straightened herself defiantly.

"Why do you think any one is waiting for me?" she demanded. "What do you
know? I am heartsick with all this hiding, and--and deceit. If you know
the truth, speak out, and end it all!"

"I can't say any more than you know already," he answered--"not so much;
but last night a man was in your cabin, a man you know and quarreled with.
I didn't h