roughly armed Mrs. Jones. But all the same I was riding
some of the way back to La Chance.

There was not a thing to be seen on the corduroy road through the swamp,
or on the hill we had come down at the dead run; and I had not expected
there would be. But on the top of the hill I bade good-by to my dream
girl,--who was not mine, and was going back to Dudley. It was all I
could manage to do it, too. I did not know I was biting my lip until it
hurt; then I stopped watching her out of sight and turned back on the
business that had brought me.

You could ride a horse down the hill into the swamp if you knew how; and
I did. I tied him to a tree and went over each side of the corduroy road
on my feet. It was silent as death there in the cold gray morning, with
the frost-fog clinging in the somber hemlocks, and the swamp frozen so
solid that my moccasins never left a mark. No one else's feet had left a
mark there, either, and I would have given up the idea that a man had
been cached by the road the night before, if it had not been for two
things.

One was a dead wolf, with a gash in his throat in which the knife had
been left till he was cold; you could tell by the blood clots round the
wound: the other I did not find at once. But wolves do not stab
themselves, and I remembered that the lone wolf cry ahead of us on that
road had been a dying cry, not a hunting one. If Collins had killed the
beast he had waited there long enough to let an hour pass before he took
his knife out of its throat: so he had been there when we raced
by,--which was all I wanted to know, except where he had gone since. As
for the other thing I found, it was behind the hemlocks when I quartered
the sides of the road in the silence and the frost-fog: and it was
nothing but a patch of shell ice. But the flimsy, crackling stuff was
crushed into two cup-like marks, as plainly telltale as if I had seen a
man fall on his knees in them. And by them, frozen there, were a dozen
drops of blood.

I knew angrily that if it were Collins's blood he had not missed it
particularly, for he had moved away without leaving a sign of a trail.
Where to I had no means of knowing, till five minutes later I found
another spatter of blood on my corduroy road,--and as I looked at it my
own blood boiled. There was not only no one but that young devil Collins
who could have lain in wait for me; but he had had the nerve to walk
away on my own road! Where to, beat me; but conside