ring with panic.

"You saw what?"

"Nothing. I thought for a minute that it was a bit of something white,
but it was gone all at once."

"White--vanished at once--went into the dark as fast as a horse can
gallop?"

"Something like that. Do you think it was some one?"

For answer the boy whipped out his revolver, examined it, and spun the
cylinder with shaking hands. Then he said through set teeth: "So you
come up here trailin' _him_ after you, eh?"

"Who?"

"McGurk!"

The name came like a rifle shot and Mary rose in turn and shrank back
toward the wall, for there was murder in the lighted black eyes which
stared after her and crumbling fear in her own heart at the thought of
McGurk hovering near,--of the peril that impended for Pierre. Of the
nights in the valley of the Crow she refused to let herself think. Cold
beads of perspiration stood out on her forehead.

"You fool--you fool! Damn your pretty pink-and-white face--you've done
for us all! Get out!"

Mary moved readily enough toward the door, her teeth chattering with
terror in the face of this fury.

Jack continued wildly: "Done for us all; got us all as good as under the
sod. I wish you was in-- Get out quick, or I'll forget--you're a woman!"

He broke into a shrill, hysterical laughter, which stopped short and
finished in a heart-broken whisper: "Pierre!"

CHAPTER XXXI

LAUGHTER

At that Mary, who stood with her hand on the latch, whirled and stood
wide-eyed, her astonishment greater than her fear, for that whisper
told her a thousand things.

Through her mind all the time that she stayed in the cabin there had
passed a curious surmise that this very place might be the covert of
Pierre le Rouge--he of the dark red hair and the keen blue eyes. There
was a fatality about it, for the invisible Power which had led her up
the valley of the Old Crow surely would not make mistakes.

In her search for Pierre, Providence brought her to this place, and
Providence could not be wrong. This, a vague emotion stirring in her
somewhere between reason and the heart, grew to an almost certain
knowledge as she heard the whisper, the faint, heartbroken whisper:
"Pierre!"

And when she turned to the boy again, noting the shirts and the chaps
hanging at the wall, she knew they belonged to Pierre as surely as if
she had seen him hang them there.

The fingers of Jack were twisted around the butt of his revolver, white
with the intensity of the