be rough with her," the old crone spoke from behind Madge.

The young girl felt her arms roughly seized and drawn back. She was
forced to the ground. She struggled at first, but she was powerless. The
man took a small rope and bound her feet together so that she could not
move them. The ropes were not tight. The fellow did not wish to hurt
her, but merely to prevent her getting away.

"You can't leave this place by day, Miss," he announced quietly. "I
can't have anybody following you back here and running me down. When
night comes I'll let you go."

Madge bit her lips. Night! Once more she must wander alone in the
darkness in a vain search for her lost friends. What would they think if
a day, as well as a night, passed with no sign of her?

Her big blue eyes were dark with grief and protest. "Please let me go,"
she entreated. "I promise, on my honor, that I will never show any one
your hiding place, or say that I have seen you. I must get back to my
friends, they will be so frightened." She was shaking with terror and
anger, but she struggled to keep back her tears. Surely the man must
relent and let her go back to the houseboat.

He turned away without paying the least attention to her demands.
Creeping under the pile of underbrush, he lay so still that no one would
have dreamed that a human being was concealed there.

It came over poor Madge, at first dully, then with complete conviction,
that the man whom she had come upon in the woods was a fugitive from
justice--an outlaw hiding from the police.

Madge flung herself down in the warm, soft grass. For the first time in
the seventeen years of her life she cried without any one to care for or
comfort her. Until to-day Eleanor, her uncle or aunt, or one of her
chums--some one--had always been near at hand to soothe her grief. Madge
knew that her own recklessness had got her into this predicament. She
had deserved some of the punishment. But she thought, as a great many
other people do, that she was being judged more severely than her fault
merited.

"Here, child," a voice said not unkindly, "bathe your face and eyes.
There's no use crying. We don't mean you no harm. Only you have got to
wait here."

Madge sat up; the old woman, who looked like an aged gypsy, was handing
her a dirty basin filled with a small supply of river water. The woman
evidently went about and got what was necessary for the existence of the
man and herself. At other times she kept guard ov