its favourite, its great
man as well as its friend, he was nowhere to be found. He had been seen
riding full speed into the prairie towards the Kourmash Wood, and the
starlit night had swallowed him. Constantine Jopp had also disappeared;
but at first no one gave that thought or consideration.

As the night went on, however, a feeling began to stir which it is not
good to rouse in frontier lands. It is sure to exhibit itself in forms
more objective than are found in great populations where methods of
punishment are various, and even when deadly are often refined. But
society in new places has only limited resources, and is thrown back
on primary ways and means. La Touche was no exception, and the keener
spirits, to whom O'Ryan had ever been "a white man," and who so rejoiced
in his good luck now that they drank his health a hundred times in his
own whiskey and cider, were simmering with desire for a public reproval
of Constantine Jopp's conduct. Though it was pointed out to them by
the astute Gow Johnson that Fergus and Holden had participated in the
colossal joke of the play, they had learned indirectly also the whole
truth concerning the past of the two men. They realised that Fergus and
Holden had been duped by Jopp into the escapade. Their primitive sense
of justice exonerated the humourists and arraigned the one malicious
man. As the night wore on they decided on the punishment to be meted out
by La Touche to the man who had not "acted on the square."

Gow Johnson saw, too late, that he had roused a spirit as hard to
appease as the demon roused in O'Ryan earlier in the evening. He would
have enjoyed the battue of punishment under ordinary circumstances; but
he knew that Miss Molly Mackinder would be humiliated and indignant
at the half-savage penalty they meant to exact. He had determined that
O'Ryan should marry her; and this might be an obstruction in the path.
It was true that O'Ryan now would be a rich man--one of the richest in
the West, unless all signs failed; but meanwhile a union of fortunes
would only be an added benefit. Besides, he had seen that O'Ryan was in
earnest, and what O'Ryan wanted he himself wanted even more strongly.
He was not concerned greatly for O'Ryan's absence. He guessed that Terry
had ridden away into the night to work off the dark spirit that was on
him, to have it out with himself. Gow Johnson was a philosopher. He was
twenty years older than O'Ryan, and he had studied his friend as