nough to
step forward now and fight for yourself?"

Wickersham clucked drily in his throat, and lifted an elbow to shield
his face. Shrinking back behind the first shelter that chance afforded
him he put the girl between him and his fear. And then weakness seized
upon that sick and swaying man, but he spoke to her--to the unspeakable
horror in her eyes.

"Barbara," he called thickly, "Barbara!"

He groped toward her, and she cried out, and drew back from such hands
as those. Then a black wall rose before him and shut her from his
sight. Fat Joe caught him as he fell.

Like huddled sheep, O'Mara's men and Wickersham's watched Joe bear him
up the hill. Shayne and Fallon were bending over Harrigan; by the
others he lay ignored. It was a mob without a leader until, as is the
way in all crises, a new leader arose. Big Louie, stolid face no
longer stolid, strode between those two factions and achieved the
unknown heights for which his eyes had always hungered.

"I work for no man but is a man," he boomed. "That bridge--she still
is hold!"

Steve had bidden Hardwick Elliott watch these men if their big moment
ever came. And Elliott and Allison watched now. They were sheep no
longer, nor malcontents, nor misled tools of cunning. Like wolves they
followed that nameless man who was out upon the jam. Wickersham's men
were back on the river, but that bridge would continue to hold! And
while they worked, while Elliott and her father watched spellbound,
blindly Barbara Allison turned, with no thought of what she was doing,
and walked blindly into the brush.

The river was running clear by dusk when they raised the first hue and
cry for her. It was dark when a runner bore the news to the cabin on
the hillside that she was missing. And when men had been beating the
woods for her for twelve hours as best they could in the dark, and no
word came that she was found, Fat Joe no longer dared let lie in sleep
his friend whose body he had cleansed and bandaged. At daybreak Joe
waked him and told him Barbara was lost. They tried to argue with him,
for his knees were still unsteady; even Allison whose jovial body
seemed to have shrunk during his hours of waiting tried to convince him
that the men now looking for her would find her soon or had already
found her, perhaps. But he brushed them away while he was dressing; he
threw off the hands that tried to detain him. And it was Steve who
found her, as he had known it w