He went thoughtfully to his own cabin, and, down-headed in his musings, he became aware with a start of Lou Macon in the hut.  She had changed the room as her father had bidden her to do.  Just wherein the difference lay, Donnegan could not tell.  There was a touch of evergreen in one corner; she had laid a strip of bright cloth over the rickety little table, and in ten minutes she had given the hut a semblance of permanent livableness.  Donnegan saw her now, with some vestige of the smile of her art upon her face; but she immediately smoothed it to perfect gravity.  He had never seen such perfect self-command in a woman.

“Is there anything more that I can do?” she asked, moving toward the door.

“Nothing.”

“Good night.”

“Wait.”

She still seemed to be under the authority which the colonel had delegated to Donnegan when they started for The Corner.  She turned, and without a word came back to him.  And a pang struck through Donnegan.  What would he not have given if she had come at his call not with these dumb eyes, but with a spark of kindliness?  Instead, she obeyed him as a soldier obeys a commander.

“There has been trouble,” said Donnegan.

“Yes?” she said, but there was no change in her face.

“It was forced upon me.”  Then he added:  “It amounted to a shooting affair.”

There was a change in her face now, indeed.  A glint came in her eyes, and the suggestion of the colonel which he had once or twice before sensed in her, now became more vivid than ever before.  The same contemptuous heartlessness, which was the colonel’s most habitual expression, now looked at Donnegan out of the lovely face of the girl.

“They were fools to press you to the wall,” she said.  “I have no pity for them.”

For a moment Donnegan only stared at her; on what did she base her confidence in his prowess as a fighting man?

“It was only one man,” he said huskily.

Ah, there he had struck her home!  As though the words were a burden, she shrank from him; then she slipped suddenly close to him and caught both his hands.  Her head was raised far back; she had pressed close to him; she seemed in every line of her body to plead with him against himself, and all the veils which had curtained her mind from him dropped away.  He found himself looking down into eyes full of fire and shadow; and eager lips; and the fiber of her voice made her whole body tremble.

“It isn’t Jack?” she pleaded.  “It isn’t Jack that you’ve fought with?”

And he said to himself:  “She loves him with all her heart and soul!”

“It is he,” said Donnegan in an agony.  Pain may be like a fire that tempers some strong men; and now Donnegan, because he was in torment, smiled, and his eye was as cold as steel.

The girl flung away his hands.

“You bought murderer!” she cried at him.

“He is not dead.”