from
other firearms, and that Dorothy might fall. As it was, the mob had come
for him alone, so he walked over and laid his revolver quietly down on
the table.

But the girl had seen the by-play and had rightly interpreted its
meaning. For her the future held no promise--except a tragedy she could
not face, and for a distracted moment she forgot even her baby as she
reacted to the bitterness of her vendetta blood. So she caught up Hump
Doane's rifle that still rested against the wall near her hand and threw
the muzzle to Rowlett's breast.

"I'll git _you_, anyhow," she screamed between clenched teeth, and it
was a promise she would have kept; a promise that would have turned
that room into a shambles had not one of the masked figures been
dexterous enough in his intervention to reach her and snatch the gun
from her grasp--still unfired.

Dorothy stepped back then, her eyes staring with the fury of failure as
she gazed at the man who had disarmed her--while one by one other dark
and uniformed figures continued to enter and range themselves about the
wall.

The night-rider who held the captured rifle had not spoken, but the
woman's eye, as it ranged up and down, caught sight of a shoe--and she
recognized a patch. That home-mending told her that the enemy who had
balked her in the last poor comfort of vengeance was Sim Squires, a
member of her own household, and her lips moved in their impulse to call
out his name in denunciation and revilement.

They moved and then, in obedience to some sudden afterthought, closed
tight again without speaking, but her eyes did speak in silent anathema
of scorn--and though she did not know or suspect it, the thoughts
mirrored in them were read and interpreted by the mob-leader.

Dorothy crossed the floor of the room, ringed with its border of grimly
cloaked humanity, and took her stand by the side of the man who leaned
stoically at the corner of his hearth. At least she could do that much
in declaration of loyalty.

Thornton himself folded his arms and, as his eyes ran over the anonymous
beings who had come to kill him, he fell back on the only philosophy
left him: that of dying with such as unwhining demeanour as should rob
them of triumph in their gloating.

At length the door closed, and it was with a dramatic effect of climax
that the last man who entered bore, coiled on his arm, the slender but
stout rope which was to be both actual instrument and symbol of their
purpose t