irm belief that
all mortal ills come to man through his own agency, and this last ill
of mine is no exception. I declare solemnly before you all that my
cousin Burr Gordon is not guilty of administering this wound which I
bear in my side."

The sheriff started forward. "Who did do it, then?" he cried out.

"I myself," replied Lot Gordon.

Chapter XIV

There was a gasp of astonishment from the company. Jonas Hapgood
began to speak, but Madelon's soprano drowned out his thick bass.

"How dare you," she cried out, "swear to that lie? Liar! You are a
liar, Lot Gordon!"

Then, before Lot could reply, David Hautville came forward with a
mighty plunge, and grasped his daughter by the arm, and forced her to
the door.

"Get ye out of this," growled David Hautville; but Madelon turned her
face back in the doorway for one last word. "Don't you know," she
shrieked back to Lot Gordon, in her pitiless despair--"don't you know
that I would rather have seen the inside of my prison-cell to-night
and the gallows to-morrow than this, Lot Gordon?"

"Quit your talk!" shouted David Hautville; and she followed his
fierce leading out of the house into the yard.

"Get ye into this sleigh," ordered her father; and she obeyed.
Suddenly the fire of passion and revolt seemed to die out in her; it
was like a lull in a spiritual storm. She rode home with her father,
and neither spoke. David Hautville now considered the matter as past
any words of reasoning. He was convinced that his daughter's fair
wits were shaken, and that nothing but summary dealing, as with a
child, could avail anything. When they reached home he bade her, with
a kind of stern forbearance, to get into the house at once and see to
her work there, and she obeyed again.

All that day, and many days after that, poor Madelon Hautville, who
had been striving like any warrior against the powers and
principalities of human wills and passions, and had grounded her arms
after a victory which had left her wounded almost to death, carried
her bleeding heart and walked her woman's treadmill. She scoured
faithfully the pewter dishes and the iron pots. She swept the hearth
clean and baked and brewed and spun and sewed. Her lot would have
been easier had her woe befallen her generations before, and she
could, instead, have backed her heavy load of tenting through the
snow on wild hunting-parties, and broken the ice on the river for
fish, and perchance taken a hand at the de