he
other. But Lola knew.

Then came the day itself--a golden summer day as sweet and bright as
that one years ago when Courtrey had married Ellen--at this same pine
building where the laughable legal farces were enacted now.

Pale as a new moon Ellen rode in across the rolling stretches on one
of the Ironwoods, with Cleve beside her. She was spiritless, silent.
Cleve was silent, too, though for a far different reason. There was a
frown between his brows, a glitter in his narrowed eyes. He was
thinking of the only man in Corvan whom he had been able to persuade
to present Ellen's protest--Dick Burtree, one-time lawyer and man of
parts in the outside, now a puffed and threadbare vagabond, whose
paramount idea was whiskey and more whiskey. But Burtree could talk.
Over his mottled and shapeless lips could, on occasion, pour a stream
of pure oratory silver as the Vestal's Veil.

When he was drunk he feared neither man nor devil, and he could speak
best so. Therefore Cleve had given him enough money in advance to put
him in trim.

"What you think Buck'll say about me, Cleve?" Ellen asked anxiously.
"What's he mean to accuse me of?"

"Any dirty thing he can trump up, Sis," said Cleve gravely, "he's
a-goin' to make it a nasty mess--an' I wish to God you'd jest ride on
down th' Wall with me an' never even look back."

He leaned from his saddle and took the blue-veined hand in his. There
was an unspeakable tenderness in his eyes as he regarded his sister.
"What you say, Ellen? There's life below, an' work an' other men.
You'll marry again, sometime----"

But Ellen shook her head with its maize-gold crown.

"Nary other man, Cleve," she said gently. "I'm all Buck's woman."

So they rode on toward the town, and Cleve knew that his last faint
hope was dead.

In the town itself there was a stir. Courtrey was there, and Wylackie
Bob, and Black Bart and Arizona, a bunch of dark, evil men in all
surety.

The Ironwoods were in evidence everywhere, but strange to say, there
were no Finger Marks. Not a man from the Holding was in town.

When Cleve and Ellen, alone together, rode in, it lacked yet a half
hour of the time set for trial. There was no place to go but Baston's,
so they dismounted at the hitch-rack. Ellen, swaying on her feet,
looked all around with her big pale eyes, and when she saw Courtrey
some distance away she put a hand to her heart as simply as a hurt
child. She was a pitiful creature in her long white dre