ge that would pour oil upon all these wounds.

A bad nature grows worse with failure. Seeking to injure his former people
and failing at every turn, Braxton Wyatt hated them more and more all the
time. His wrath was particularly directed against the five who had been
such great instruments in sending his careful plans astray. His scheme
with the Indian league had failed chiefly through them, but he felt that
he could now come with a Spanish force that would prove irresistible. That
was why he glowed with internal warmth and pride. The settlements would be
destroyed and he, in fact, would be the destroyer.

Braxton Wyatt entered the edge of the woods, still occupied with the cruel
triumph that was to be his. He did not notice that the foliage was
gradually shutting out the firelight. Presently he saw, or believed that
he saw, a shadowy but terrible figure. It was the figure of the one whom
he dreaded most on earth.

It was but a glimpse of a form, seen through the bushes, but Wyatt's blood
turned cold in every vein. He uttered a half-choked cry, and running back
through the bushes, sprang into the firelight. Two or three Spanish
soldiers looked at him in amazement, but he was not a coward, and he had
pride of a kind. As soon as he leaped back into the firelight he felt that
he had made a fool of himself. Henry Ware could not have been there--he
and his comrades had been left behind long ago. Coming suddenly out of his
thoughts, he had been deceived in the dark by a bush and imagination had
done the rest. Yes, it was only fancy!

"A rattlesnake! I nearly trod on him," he said in broken Spanish words
that he had picked up, and then walked in as careless a manner as he could
assume toward the mound where Francisco Alvarez sat. But he could not
wholly control himself--the shock had been too great--and his body yet
trembled. He did not know it, but the pallor of his face showed through
the tan, and Alvarez noticed it.

"You have had a fright, Senor Wyatt," he said in his precise, cold
English. "What is it?"

"Not a fright," replied Wyatt in tones that he sought to make indifferent,
"but a start. I nearly trod on a rattlesnake that lay coiled ready to
strike, and I got away just in time."

The Spaniard regarded him with a penetrating look, but the chilly blue
eyes expressed nothing. Yet Francisco Alvarez thought that a bold woodsman
like Braxton Wyatt would not show so much fear after a harmless passage
with any kind of