de to suffer as I have. But I
knew it would come. I have known it every day of those twenty years,
because I have read it in that book in which I have read so many
things which concern human life. I was robbed of life years and years
ago. Yes, life. I have been a dead woman these twenty years. My life
was gone when your father died, leaving you, another woman's child, in
my hands. God in heaven! Sometimes I wonder why I did not strangle the
wretched life out of you years ago--you, another woman's child, but
yet with Charles Stanmore's blood in your veins. Perhaps it was
because of that I spared your life. Perhaps it was because I read your
fate, and knew you had to suffer, that I preferred my sister's child
should reap the reward of her mother's crime--yes, crime. Perhaps it
was that while Charles Stanmore lived my hopes and longings were still
capable of fulfilment. But he is dead--dead years and years ago. And
with his death my life went out too. Now there is only revenge. No,
not revenge," she laughed, "justice to be dealt out. That justice it
is my joy to see dispensed. That justice it is my joy to feel that my
hand has brought its administering about.

"I have laid all the information necessary. I have a lawyer in Leeson
Butte in communication with my man in New York. And--and the sheriff
and his men will be here before daylight. Oh, yes, I can afford to
tell you now that the work is accomplished. You shall have no
opportunity of communicating with your friends. I shall not sleep
to-night. Nor will you leave this house. There is a means of holding
you here. A means which will never be far from my hand." She tapped
the bosom of her dress significantly, and Joan understood that she had
armed herself. "The arrest will be made while they are still sleeping
in that old fort of theirs--and your young Buck will pay the penalty
if he interferes. Yes, yes," she added, rubbing her lean, almost
skeleton hands together in an access of satisfaction, "when you sip
your coffee in the morning, my girl, your Buck's foster-father will be
on his way to the jail from which he will only emerge for the comfort
of an electric chair. I have endured twenty years of mental torture,
but--I have not endured them in vain."

The cold, consummate completeness with which the woman detailed her
carefully considered plans turned Joan's heart to stone. It chilled
her and left her shivering in the awful heat. For one moment, one weak
moment when he