Craig.

"We have given you your chance to show how you respect the law. What you
have done after a legal warning is chalked up against you. Now that you
have proclaimed yourselves as outlaws I have something of my own to
proclaim to you. I am up here----"

A stentorian voice slashed in sharply, and Craig's speech was cut off.

The voice came from one who was veiled in the fog, but they all knew it
for Ward Latisan's. "Yes, Craig, you're here--here about five hours
ahead of me because you had the cash to hire a special train. However, I
know the short cuts for a man on horseback. I'm here, too!"

His men got a dim view of him in the mists; he loomed like a statue of
heroic size on the horse. Then he flung himself off and came running
down the shore.

He went straight to Lida and faced her manfully; but his eyes were
humbly beseeching and his features worked with contrite apology. "I know
now who you are, Miss Kennard. I don't mean to presume, in the case of
either you or your men. But will you allow me to speak to them?"

"Yes," she assented, trying to hold her poise, helped by his manner.

He turned quickly from her eyes as if her gaze tortured him.

"I have been a coward, men. I ran away from my job. I'm ashamed of
myself. I can't square myself, but let me do my bit to-day."

"I don't know what you can do--with that gang o' sneaks--after real men
have had to quit," growled Vittum, unimpressed.

"Maybe I'm sneak enough these days to know how to deal with 'em,"
confessed Latisan, bitterly. "I stayed back there just now while the
fight was on, but I knew a man fight wouldn't get us anything from
them."

The men of the crew made no demonstration; they were awkwardly silent.
The arrival of the deserter who confessed that he had been a coward did
not encourage them at a time when they had failed ridiculously in their
first sortie. He had ceased to be a captain who could inspire. He was
one man more in a half-whipped crew, that was all.

They who had been dumped over the dam dragged slimy mud from their faces
and surveyed him with sullen rebuke, remembering sharply that he had run
away from the girl whose cause they had taken up.

The others, their faces marked with welts from blows, gazed and sniffed
disparagingly.

But when he spoke out to the girl and her crew they listened with
increasing respect because a quick shift to manly resolution impressed
them.

His tone was tensely low and the noise of the tumb