At this Donnegan wakened.  His sneer was not a pleasant thing to see.

“Send her to a new mining camp.  Colonel Macon, you have the gambling spirit; you are willing to take great chances!”

“So!  So!” murmured the colonel, a little taken aback.  “But I should never send her except with an adequate protector.”

“An adequate protector even against these celebrated gunmen who run the camp as you have already admitted?”

“An adequate protector—­you are the man!”

Donnegan shivered.

“I?  I take your daughter to the camp and play her against Nelly Lebrun to win back Jack Landis?  Is that the scheme?”

“It is.”

“Ah,” murmured Donnegan.  And he got up and began to walk the room, white-faced; the colonel watched him in a silent agony of anxiety.

“She truly loves this Landis?” asked Donnegan, swallowing.

“A love that has grown out of their long intimacy together since they were children.”

“Bah!  Calf love!  Let the fellow go and she will forget him.  Hearts are not broken in these days by disappointments in love affairs.”

The colonel writhed in his chair.

“But Lou—­you do not know her heart!” he suggested.  “If you looked closely at her you would have seen that she is pale.  She does not suspect the truth, but I think she is wasting away because Jack hasn’t written for weeks.”

He saw Donnegan wince under the whip.

“It is true,” murmured the wanderer.  “She is not like others, heaven knows!” He turned.  “And what if I fail to bring over Jack Landis with the sight of Lou?”

The colonel relaxed; the great crisis was past and Donnegan would undertake the journey.

“In that case, my dear lad, there is an expedient so simple that you astonish me by not perceiving it.  If there is no way to wean Landis away from the woman, then get him alone and shoot him through the heart.  In that way you remove from the life of Lou a man unworthy of her and you also make the mines come to the heir of Jack Landis—­namely, myself.  And in the latter case, Mr. Donnegan, be sure—­oh, be sure that I should not forget who brought the mines into my hands!”

10

Fifty miles over any sort of going is a stiff march.  Fifty miles uphill and down and mostly over districts where there was only a rough cow path in lieu of a road made a prodigious day’s work; and certainly it was an almost incredible feat for one who professed to hate work with a consuming passion and who had looked upon an eight-mile jaunt the night before as an insuperable burden.  Yet such was the distance which Donnegan had covered, and now he drove the pack mule out on the shoulder of the hill in full view of The Corner with the triangle of the Young Muddy and Christobel Rivers embracing the little town.  Even the gaunt, leggy mule was tired to the dropping point, and the tough buckskin which trailed up behind