gainst the other's
overtures. For the most part she maintained a hardy silence; and when
she did speak, it was in sullen monosyllables.

Issuing out of the tent, she surprised Garth by asking, as one who
demands a right, to take old Cy. She needed an herb for Natalie, she
said, that could only be procured on the shore of a slough five miles
away. Garth was prompt with his permission. There was a possibility
that it was merely a pretext to deprive them of the horse; but his heart
leaped at the chance of getting Rina out of the way for an hour. It was
all he needed to complete his plan; and it had seemed an insuperable
bar. If she turned the horse out, he would come back anyway; for Cy was
the town-bred horse, always waiting anxiously about camp for his
vanished stable; and Garth had further trained him to stick to the
outfit, with judicious presents of salt and tobacco.

Rina, disdaining a saddle, scrambled on his back, and rode off. Garth
waited, not without anxiety, to see what direction she would take. She
presently reappeared, mounting the rise to the shack. Pausing briefly at
the door, apparently to speak within, she continued her way up the slope
behind; and, gaining the prairie, disappeared over the brow.

Garth instantly put himself in motion. He had his compunctions in thus
moving against Rina while she was absent on an errand for Natalie; but
he consoled himself with the thought that Rina, with all she could do,
had still a heavy score to pay off. He told Natalie what he was about to
do; and at her earnest pleading carried her out of the tent, and propped
her partly upright at the edge of the lake where she would be able to
see him. Then, looking to his gun, he set off a second time for the
shack.

From the circumstance of Rina's pausing at the door, he was well assured
that Mabyn was within. He had marked that the door stood open. On his
way, he paused to examine the ancient dugout lying at the mouth of the
watercourse; and found it in a sufficiently seaworthy condition to
answer his purpose. A paddle lay in the bottom.

Garth ascended the grassy slope swiftly and noiselessly; and making a
detour around the window, presented himself suddenly at the door. Mabyn
was revealed to him sprawling on his blankets in the corner, plucking at
his face, and scowling at the rafters, he, too, no doubt, plotting and
scheming. When the armed shadow fell across the floor of his shack, he
started to his elbow; his eyes wid