to aid me--to
advise your friends to settle. Now, will you listen?"

"No." She looked him straight in the eyes.

"Oh, I guess you will," he sneered. "It concerns your friend, Mr. Keith,
whom you thought so much of. Your friend Keith has placed himself in a
very equivocal position. I will have him behind bars before I am done.
Wait until I have shown that when he got all that money from the English
people he knew that that land was mine, and that he had run the lines
falsely on which he got the money."

"Let me pass," said Lois. With her head held high she started again to
walk by him; but he seized her by the wrist.

"This is not Central Park. You shall hear me."

"Let me go, Mr. Wickersham," she said imperiously. But he held her
firmly.

At that moment she heard an oath behind her, and a voice exclaimed:

"It is you, at last! And still troubling women!"

Wickersham's countenance suddenly changed. He released her wrist and
fell back a step, his face blanching. The next second, as she turned
quickly, old Adam Rawson's bulky figure was before her. He was hurrying
toward her: the very apotheosis of wrath. His face was purple; his eyes
blazed; his massive form was erect, and quivering with fury. His heavy
stick was gripped in his left hand, and with the other he was drawing a
pistol from his pocket.

"I have waited for you, you dog, and you have come at last!" he cried.

Wickersham, falling back before his advance, was trying, as Lois looked,
to get out a pistol. His face was as white as death. Lois had no time
for thought. It was simply instinct. Old Rawson's pistol was already
levelled. With a cry she threw herself between them; but it was
too late.

She was only conscious of a roar and blinding smoke in her eyes and of
something like a hot iron at her side; then, as she sank down, of
Squire Rawson's stepping over her. Her sacrifice was in vain, for the
old man was not to be turned from his revenge. As he had sworn, so he
performed. And the next moment Wickersham, with two bullets in his body,
had paid to him his long-piled-up debt.

When Lois came to, she was in bed, and Dr. Balsam was leaning over her
with a white, set face.

"I am all right," she said, with a faint smile. "Was he hurt?"

"Don't talk now," said the Doctor, quietly. "Thank God, you are not hurt
much."

Keith was sitting in his office in New Leeds alone that afternoon. He
had just received a telegram from Dave Dennison that Wickersham h