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The shade of wall and foliage above, and another juround ahead, and he almost stumbled upon a cabin, hidden on three sides, with a s in front It was an old, ramshackle structure like others he had run across in the canons Cautiously he approached and peeped around the corner At first swift glance it had all the appearance of long disuse But Jean had no tiround brought the same pell-ht scarcely an hour past His body jerked with its instinctive impulse, then quivered with his restraint To turn back would be risky, to run ahead would be fatal, to hide was his one hope No covert behind! And the clip-clop of hoofs sounded closer One er Jean held mastery over his instincts of self-preservation To keep fro was almost impossible It was the sheer prilided along the front of the cabin

Here he saw that the cabin adjoined another Reaching the door, he was about to peep in when the thud of hoofs and voices close at hand transfixed hirih the thin, black-streaked line of trees he sawthe door, his keen nose caught a musty, woody odor and the tail of his eye saw bare dirt floor This cabin was unused He halted-gave a quick look back And the first thing his eye fell upon was a ladder, right inside the door, against the wall He looked up It led to a loft that, dark and gloomy, stretched halfway across the cabin An irresistible i inside, he cliht up there But he crawled on the rough-hewn rafters and, turning with his head toward the opening, he stretched out and lay still

What seemed an interminable moment ended with a tra ears caught the jingle of spurs and a thud of boots striking the ground

"Wal, sweetheart, heah we are ho Texas voice

"Home! I wonder, Colter--did y'u ever have a home--a mother--a sister--much less a sweetheart?" was the reply, bitter and caustic

Jean's palpitating, hot body suddenly stretched still and cold with intensity of shock His very bones see the instant of realization his heart stopped And a slow, contracting pressure enveloped his breast and ed to Ellen Jorth The sound of it had lingered in his dreams He had stumbled upon the rendezvous of the Jorth faction Hard indeed had been the fates meted out to those of the Isbels and Jorths who had passed to their deaths But, no ordeal, not even Queen's, could compare with this desperate one Jean ely, wonderfully, and he had scorned repute to believe her good He had spared her father and her uncle He had weakened or lost the cause of the Isbels He loved her now, desperately, deathlessly, knowing from her own lips that she orthless--loved her the more because he had felt her terrible shame And to him--the last of the Isbels--had coht like a crippled rat in a trap; to be coun; to listen, and perhaps to see Ellen Jorth enact the very truth of herinsinuation His will, his promise, his creed, his blood must hold him to the stem decree that he should be the last man of the Jorth-Isbel war But could he lie there to hear--to see--when he had a knife and an arm?