"Has he wronged you, too?" she asked.

He lifted his hand to his forehead slowly, as if in a gesture of pain.
The blood had drained from his face; his cheek-bones were marked white
through his wind-hardened skin.

"It's not a subject to be discussed with a woman, sir," said he
absently. "There was a wife--somewhere there was a wife! This man came
between us. I was not then what I am today--a shepherd on the hills....
But I must keep you here; you will betray me and warn him if I let you
go!" he cried, rousing suddenly, catching her bridle again.

"No, I'll not warn him," Agnes assured him.

"If I thought you would"--he hesitated, searching her face with his
fevered eyes, in which red veins showed as in the eyes of an angry
dog--"I'd have to sacrifice you!"

Agnes felt that she never could draw her weapon in time, in case the
eccentric tried to take it away again, and her heart quailed as she
measured the distance she would have to ride before the fall of the
ground would protect her, even if she should manage to break his hold on
the bridle, and gallop off while he was fetching his pistol from the
wagon.

"I'll not warn him," said she, placing her hand on his arm. "I give you
my sincere word that I'll do nothing to save him from what I feel to be
your just vengeance."

"Go, before I doubt you again!" he cried, slapping her horse with his
palm as he let go the bridle.

From the tip of the hill she looked back. He had disappeared--into the
wagon, she supposed; and she made haste to swerve from the straight
course to put another hill between them, in case he might run after her,
his mad mind again aflame with the belief that she would cheat him of
his revenge.

Agnes arrived in camp full of tremors and contradictory emotions. One
minute she felt that she should ride and warn Boyle, guilty as he might
be, and deserving of whatever punishment the hand of the wronged man
might be able to inflict; the next she relieved herself of this impulse
by arguing that the insane sheep-herder was plainly the instrument of
fate--she lacked the temerity, after the first flush, to credit it to
Providence--lifted up to throw his troubles between her and her own.

She sat in the sun before her tent thinking it over, for and against,
cooling considerably and coming to a saner judgment of the situation.
Every little while she looked toward the hills, to see if the shepherd
had followed her. She had seen no horse in the man's camp; h