ransmitted was beyond
his simple comprehension. He shook his head with a fierce
helplessness and went into the barn.

"Go in and get the supper," he ordered, "and _I_'ll take care of the
mare."

As Madelon came out of the stall he grasped her roughly by the arm
and peered sharply into her face. The thought seized him that she
must surely not be in her right mind--that Burr's treatment of her
and his danger had turned her brain. "Be you crazy, Madelon?" he
asked, in his straightforward simplicity, and there was an accent of
doubt and pity in his voice.

"No, father," she replied, "I am not crazy. Let me go."

She broke away from him and was out of the barn door, but suddenly
she turned and came running back. The sudden softness in his voice
had stirred the woman in her to weakness. She went close to her
father, and threw up her arms around his great neck, and clung to
him, and sobbed as if she would sob her soul away, and pleaded with
him as for her life.

"Father!" she cried--"father, help me! Believe me! Tell them I did
it! Tell them it is true! Don't let them hang Burr. Help me to save
him, father! Don't let them! Save him! Oh, you will save him, father?
You will? Tell me, father--tell me, tell me!" Madelon's voice rose
into a wild shriek.

A sudden conviction of his solution of the matter and of his own
astuteness came over David Hautville's primitive masculine
intelligence. His daughter was wellnigh distraught with her lover's
faithlessness and his awful crime and danger. She was to be watched
and guarded lest she make a further spectacle of herself; but treated
softly as might be, for she was naught but a woman, and liable to
mischievous ailments of nerve and brain. David pressed his daughter's
dark head with his hard, tender hand against his shoulder, then
forced her gently away from him.

"It'll be all right," said he, soothingly--"it'll be all right. Don't
you worry."

"Father, you will?"

"I'll fix it all right. Don't you worry."

"Father, you promise?"

"I'll do everything I can. Don't you worry, Madelon. You'd better go
in and get supper now. I'll go along to the house with you and get
the lantern. It's getting too dark to do the work here."

David drew his daughter along, out of the barn, across the snowy yard
to the house, she pleading frantically all the way, he soothing her
with his sudden wisdom of assent and evasion.

The hearth fire was blazing high when Madelon entered the kitchen.