ith a face of
misery.

A moment afterward came a rush of people. Goatry kept them back.

"Sergeant Foyle arrested Halbeck, and Halbeck's shot himself," Goatry
explained to them.

A white-faced girl with a scar on her temple made her way into the room.

"Come away-come away, Jo," said the voice of the man she loved; and he
did not let her see the lifeless figure in the chair.

Three days later the plains swallowed them, as they made their way with
Billy Goatry to the headquarters of the Riders of the Plains, where
Sergeant Foyle was asked to reconsider his resignation: which he did.

THE WHISPERER

"And thou shalt be brought down and shalt speak out of the ground,
and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be
as of one that hath a familiar spirit out of the ground, and thy
speech shall whisper out of the dust."

The harvest was all in, and, as far as eye could observe nothing
remained of the golden sea of wheat which had covered the wide prairie
save the yellow stubble, the bed of an ocean of wealth which had been
gathered. Here, the yellow level was broken by a dark patch of fallow
land, there, by a covert of trees also tinged with yellow, or deepening
to crimson and mauve--the harbinger of autumn. The sun had not the
insistent and intensive strength of more southerly climes; it was
buoyant, confident and heartening, and it shone in a turquoise vault
which covered and endeared the wide, even world beneath. Now and then
a flock of wild ducks whirred past, making for the marshes or the
innumerable lakes that vitalised the expanse, or buzzards hunched
heavily along, frightened from some far resort by eager sportsmen.

That was above; but beneath, on a level with the unlifted eye, were
houses here and there, looking in the vastness like dolls' habitations.
Many of the houses stood blank and staring in the expanse, but some
had trees, and others little oases of green. Everywhere prosperity,
everywhere the strings of life pulled taut, signs that energy had been
straining on the leash.

Yet there was one spot where it seemed that deadness made encampment. It
could not be seen in the sweep of the eye, you must have travelled and
looked vigilantly to find it; but it was there--a lake shimmering in the
eager sun, washing against a reedy shore, a little river running into
the reedy lake at one end and out at, the other, a small, dilapidated
house half hid in a wood that stretched