d back, forced now to walk slowly and
carefully. It was then, with the violence and fury of intense muscular
activity denied her, that the tremendous import of Bill Isbel's
revelation burst upon her very flesh and blood and transfiguring the
very world of golden light and azure sky and speaking forestland that
encompassed her.

Not a drop of the precious water did she spill. Not a misstep did she
make. Yet so great was the spell upon her that she was not aware she
had climbed the steep slope until the dog yelped his welcome. Then
with all the flood of her emotion surging and resurging she knelt to
allay the parching thirst of this dying enemy whose words had changed
frailty to strength, hate to love, and, the gloomy hell of despair to
something unutterable. But she had returned too late. Bill Isbel was
dead.

CHAPTER XIII

Jean Isbel, holding the wolf-dog Shepp in leash, was on the trail of
the most dangerous of Jorth's gang, the gunman Queen. Dark drops of
blood on the stones and plain tracks of a rider's sharp-heeled boots
behind coverts indicated the trail of a wounded, slow-traveling
fugitive. Therefore, Jean Isbel held in the dog and proceeded with the
wary eye and watchful caution of an Indian.

Queen, true to his class, and emulating Blue with the same magnificent
effrontery and with the same paralyzing suddenness of surprise, had
appeared as if by magic at the last night camp of the Isbel faction.
Jean had seen him first, in time to leap like a panther into the
shadow. But he carried in his shoulder Queen's first bullet of that
terrible encounter. Upon Gordon and Fredericks fell the brunt of
Queen's fusillade. And they, shot to pieces, staggering and falling,
held passionate grip on life long enough to draw and still Queen's guns
and send him reeling off into the darkness of the forest.

Unarmed, and hindered by a painful wound, Jean had kept a vigil near
camp all that silent and menacing night. Morning disclosed Gordon and
Fredericks stark and ghastly beside the burned-out camp-fire, their
guns clutched immovably in stiffened hands. Jean buried them as best
he could, and when they were under ground with flat stones on their
graves he knew himself to be indeed the last of the Isbel clan. And
all that was wild and savage in his blood and desperate in his spirit
rose to make him more than man and less than human. Then for the third
time during these tragic last days the wolf-dog Shepp came