from all this
serenity and safety. In his own time he spoke deliberately. He had sat
long preparing his thought.

"Phil Baronet, you may know now you are at the end of your game. I have
waited long. An Indian learns to wait. I have waited ever since the
night you put the pink flowers on her head--Star-face's. You are strong,
you are not afraid, you are quick and cunning, you are lucky. But you
are in my land now. You have no more strength, and your cunning and
courage and luck are useless. They don't know where you are. They don't
know about this place." He pointed toward the tents as he spoke. "When
they do find you, you won't do them any good." He laughed mockingly but
not unmusically. "They'll say, 'accidental death by hunters,' as they
said of Bud. Bah! I was fooled by his hat. I thought he was you. But he
deserved it, anyhow."

So that was what had cut him off. Innocent Bud! wantonly slain, by one
the law might never reach. The thought hurt worse than the thongs that
bound me.

"Before I finish with you I'll let you have more time to think, and here
is something to think about. It was given to me by a girl who loved you,
or thought she did. She found it in a hole in the rock where Star-face
had put it. Do you know the writing?"

He held a letter before my eyes. In Marjie's well known hand I read the
inscription, "Philip Baronet, Rockport, Cliff Street."

"It's a letter Star-face put in the place you two had for a long time. I
never could find it, but Lettie did. She gave it to me. There was
another letter deeper in, but this was the only one she could get out.
Her arm was too short. Star-face and Amos Judson were married Christmas
Day. You didn't know that."

How cruelly slow he was, but it was useless to say a word. He had no
heart. No plea for mercy would move him to anything but fiendish joy
that he could call it forth. At last he opened the letter and read
aloud. He was a good reader. All his schooling had developed his power
over the English language, but it gave him nothing else.

Slowly he read, giving me time to think between the sentences. It was
the long loving letter Marjie wrote to me on the afternoon that Rachel
and I went to the old stone cabin together. It told me all the stories
she had heard, and it assured me that in spite of them all her faith in
me was unshaken.

"I know you, Phil," she had written at the end, "and I know that you are
all my own."

I understood everything now. Oh, i