travelled fast and
studiously--yet with little hope of success.

No man better than Peter Doane himself would recognize his desperation
of plight--and if he had "gone bad" there was but one road for his feet
and the security of the colony depended upon his thwarting.

Pioneer chronicles crowned with anathema unspeakable their small but
infamous roster of white renegades, headed by the hated name of Samuel
Girty; renegades who had "painted their faces and gone to the Indians!"

These were the unforgivably damned!

Now at the council-fires of Yellow-Jacket, even at the war-lodge of
Dragging Canoe himself, the voluntary coming of Peter Doane would mean
feasting and jubilation and a promise of future atrocities.

Inside Dorothy bent over the bed and saw the eyes of her lover open
slowly and painfully. His lips parted in a ghost of his old, flashing
smile.

"Is the tree safe?" he whispered.

The girl stooped and slipped an arm under the man's shoulders. The
masses of her night-dark hair fell brushing his face in a fragrant
cascade and her deep eyes were wide, unmasking to his gaze all the
candid fears and intensities of her love. Then as her lips met his in
the first kiss she had ever given him, unasked, it seemed to him that a
current of exaltation and vitality swept into him that death could not
overcome.

"I'm going to get well," he told her. "Life is too full--and without
you, heaven would be empty."

The next pack train did not arrive. But several weeks later a single,
half-famished survivor stumbled into the fort. His hands were bound, his
tongue swollen from thirst, and about his shoulders dangled a hideous
necklace of white scalps. When he had been restored to speech he
delivered the message for which his life had been spared.

"This is what's left of your pack train," was the insolent word that
Peter Doane--now calling himself Chief Mad-dog, had sent back to his
former comrades. "The balance has gone on to Yellow Jacket, but some day
I will come back for Thornton's scalp--and my squaw."

As the summer waned the young walnut tree sent down its roots to vigour
and imperceptibly lifted its crest. Its leaves did not wither but gained
in greenness and lustre, and as it prospered so Kenneth Thornton also
prospered, until when the season of corn shucking came again, he and
Dorothy stood beside it, and Caleb, who had received his credentials as
a justice of the peace, read for them the ritual of marriage.