cuse for another
good night, but Anne was vaguely troubled and remained standing on the
doorstep shivering and listening.

The road itself was so dark that she could rather feel than see the
closing in of the laurelled mountainsides, and as for the time of her
waiting, it might have been two minutes or five. She could not tell. The
wind was like a whispered growl, mounting now and again into a shrieking
dissonance, and there was no other sound until, as if in violent answer
to her fears, came the single report of a rifle immediately followed by
the hoarser barking of a pistol.

Anne, acting with a speed that sacrificed nothing to the fluster of
panic, turned back into the house, caught up the rifle that leaned near
the door and an electric flash-torch from the table. Outside again, she
found the road wet and rutty, and through the gust-driven clouds
filtered no help from the stars, but remnants of snow along the edges of
the way gave a low hint of visibility.

Several hundred yards brought her to an abrupt turning, and to her ears
there came an uncertain sound as of something heavy being thrashed about
in the mud. The girl's pupils, dilated now until the darkness was no
longer so all-concealing, could make out a shapeless mass, and it seemed
to her that the bulk--too large for a human body--stirred. Her finger
was on the button of the torch, but an impulse of caution deterred her,
and she left it unlighted. If Boone lay there wounded, her flash would
make of him a clear target for any lurking assassin.

As she stood nerve-taut and with straining eyes, a furious indignation
mounted in her. The vague shape that lay prone had become still now, and
when she had almost stepped on it, she knew it for a fallen and
riderless horse. It must be Boone's, because she would have heard the
approach of another, but the man himself was nowhere in sight. So far as
outward indications went, she was herself the only human thing within
the range of her vision or the sound of her voice.

Her suspense stretched until her knees grew weak, and the wind,
momentarily subsiding, left her in a stillness that was like bated
breath. Then she felt a touch on her elbow, and a voice barely audible
commanded, "Come back along the edge."

Under the reflex of that relief-wave her tight-keyed nerves threatened
to collapse, but for a little longer she commanded them, and when the
two stood again in her own yard, she wilted and lay limp in her lover's