a scandal!"

Low's eyes flashed. "Where is your daughter now?" he said sternly.

"At present in bed, suffering from a nervous attack brought on by these
unjust suspicions. She appreciates your anxiety, and, knowing that you
could not see her, told me to give you this." He handed Low the ring
and the letter.

The climax had been forced, and, it must be confessed, was by no means
the one Mr. Wynn had fully arranged in his own inner consciousness. He
had intended to take an ostentatious leave of Low in the bar-room,
deliver the letter with archness, and escape before a possible
explosion. He consequently backed towards the door for an emergency.
But he was again at fault. That unaffected stoical fortitude in acute
suffering, which was the one remaining pride and glory of Low's race,
was yet to be revealed to Wynn's civilized eyes.

The young man took the letter, and read it without changing a muscle,
folded the ring in it, and dropped it into his haversack. Then he
picked up his blanket, threw it over his shoulder, took his trusty
rifle in his hand, and turned toward Wynn as if coldly surprised that
he was still standing there.

"Are you--are you--going?" stammered Wynn.

"Are you _not_?" replied Low dryly, leaning on his rifle for a moment
as if waiting for Wynn to precede him. The preacher looked at him a
moment, mumbled something, and then shambled feebly and ineffectively
down the staircase before Low, with a painful suggestion to the
ordinary observer of being occasionally urged thereto by the moccasin
of the young man behind him.

On reaching the lower hall, however, he endeavored to create a
diversion in his favor by dashing into the barroom and clapping the
occupants on the back with indiscriminate playfulness. But here again
he seemed to be disappointed. To his great discomfiture, a large man
not only returned his salutation with powerful levity, but with equal
playfulness seized him in his arms, and after an ingenious simulation
of depositing him in the horse-trough set him down in affected
amazement. "Bleth't if I didn't think from the weight of your hand it
wath my old friend, Thacramento Bill," said Curson apologetically, with
a wink at the bystanders. "That'th the way Bill alwayth uthed to tackle
hith friendth, till he wath one day bounthed by a prithe-fighter in
Frithco, whom he had mithtaken for a mithionary." As Mr. Curson's
reputation was of a quality that made any form of apology from him
instan