to protect you. The safest thing for you to do is to go back
to my cabin. Ride slow, so as not to get there till they're gone. They'll
ride over to the sawmill, without doubt. If they come back this way,
remember that the deputy saw you only as a ragged old man with a long
beard, and that Haines has nothing but a printed description to go by.
There's no use trying to flee. You are a marked man in that uniform, and
you are safer right here with me than anywhere else this side of Chicago.
Haines is likely to cross the divide in the belief that you have gone that
way, and, if he does, you have no one but the deputy to deal with."

He succeeded at last in completely rousing the older man's courage.

Wetherford rose to meet his opportunity. "I'll do it," he said, firmly.

"That's the talk!" exclaimed Cavanagh, to encourage him. "You can throw
them off the track this time, and when I come back to-morrow I'll bring
some other clothing for you, and then we'll plan some kind of a scheme
that will get you out of the country. I'll not let them make a scapegoat
of you."

The ranger watched the fugitive, as he started back over the trail in this
desperate defiance of his pursuers, with far less confidence in the
outcome than he had put into words.

"All depends on Wetherford himself. If his nerve does not fail him, if
they take the uniform for granted, and do not carry the matter to the
Supervisor, we will pull the plan through." And in this hope he rode away
down the trail with bent head, for all this bore heavily upon his
relationship to the girl waiting for him in the valley. He had thought
Lize a burden, a social disability, but a convict father now made the
mother's faults of small account.

The nearer he drew to the meeting with Lee Virginia the more important
that meeting became. After all, woman is more important than war. The love
of home and the child persists through incredible vicissitudes; the
conqueror returns from foreign lands the lover still; and in the deep of
flooded mines and on the icy slopes of arctic promontories dead men have
been found holding in their rigid hands the pictured face of some fair
girl. In the presence of such irrefutable testimony, who shall deny the
persistence and the reality of love?

Cavanagh had seen Virginia hardly more than a score of times, and yet she
filled his thought, confused his plans, making of his brain a place of
doubt and hesitation. For her sake he had entered upon a p