e a minister, came back
with Kirby. They had food and something to drink with them, and lit a
lamp, so that we could see. It was awfully dismal and dark in there."
She pressed her hands to her head despairingly. "I can remember all
this, but later it is not so clear; it fades out, like a dream."

"Try to tell me all you can," I urged. "They fed you?"

"Yes, I managed to eat a little, but I would not drink. They both became
angry then and frightened me, but they did compel me to swallow some of
the stuff. Then I became dazed and partially helpless. Oh, I cannot
tell you; I do not really know myself--it seemed as though I had to do
just what they told me; I had no will of my own, no power of resistance."

"You were married to Kirby."

"Oh, God!--was I? I wondered; I did not really know; truly I did not
know. I seem to remember that I stood up, and then signed some paper,
but nothing had any meaning to me. Is that true? Do you know that it is
true?"

I grasped her hand and held it closely within my own.

"I am afraid it is true," I answered. "I know very little law, and it
may be that such a ceremony is not legal. Yet I imagine those men were
certain as to what they could do. Kirby had planned to marry you from
the very first, as I explained to you before. He told me that on the
_Warrior_ the night your father died."

"Yes, you said so; but I did not quite understand--he planned then--why?"

"Because he had heard of your beauty and that you were rich. Were these
not reasons enough? But, after he had mistaken you for Rene, the only
possible way in which he could hope to gain you was by force. Jack Rale
suggested that to him and how it could be done. The other man was a
friend of Rale's, a renegade preacher named Gaskins; he is dead."

"Dead! Killed?"

"Yes; we brought you away after a fight with those fellows. We left Rale
bound and Kirby unconscious."

"Unconscious, hurt--but not dead?"

"He had a bad gash in his skull, but was alive."

Kennedy, puffing happily upon a pipe, came loitering about the corner of
the hut and approached us. Eloise staggered to her feet, shrinking back
against the wall of the shack, her eyes on his face.

"That man here!" she cried in terror. "That man? Why, he was at
Beaucaire! He is the one to whom I claimed to be Rene."

CHAPTER XXVII

WE CHOOSE OUR COURSE

Tim grinned at me, but did not appear particularly flattered at his
reception.

"Not