“You will never be married—­to me—­while you write to other women.  Let me see that letter!...  Let me read it—­all of them!”

“No, Lenore—­not here.  And don’t speak so loud.  Your father will be coming any minute....  Lenore, he suspects me.  And that cowboy knows things.  I can’t go back to the ranch.”

“Oh, you must come!”

“No.  If you love me you’ve got to run off with me to-day.”

“But why the hurry?” she appealed.

“It’s getting hot for me.”

“What do you mean by that?  Why don’t you explain to me?  As long as you are so strange, so mysterious, how can I trust you?  You ask me to run off with you, yet you don’t put confidence in me.”

Nash grew pale and earnest, and his hands shook.

“But if I do confide in you, then will you come with me?” he queried, breathlessly.

“I’ll not promise.  Maybe what you have to tell will prove—­you—­you don’t care for me.”

“It ’ll prove I do,” he replied, passionately.

“Then tell me.”  Lenore realized she could no longer play the part she had assumed.  But Nash was so stirred by his own emotions, so carried along in a current, that he did not see the difference in her.

“Listen.  I tell you it’s getting hot for me,” he whispered.  “I’ve been put here—­close to Anderson—­to find out things and to carry out orders.  Lately I’ve neglected my job because I fell in love with you.  He’s your father.  If I go on with plans—­and harm comes to him—­I’ll never get you.  Is that clear?”

“It certainly is,” replied Lenore, and she felt a tightness at her throat.

“I’m no member of the I.W.W.,” he went on.  “Whatever that organization might have been last year, it’s gone wild this year....  There are interests that have used the I.W.W.  I’m only an agent, and I’m not high up, either.  I see what the government will do to the I.W.W. if the Northwest leaves any of it.  But just now there’re plots against a few big men like your father.  He’s to be ruined.  His crops and ranches destroyed.  And he’s to be killed.  It’s because he’s so well known and has so much influence that he was marked.  I told you the I.W.W. was being used to make trouble.  They are being stirred up by agitators, bribed and driven, all for the purpose of making a great disorder in the Northwest.”

“Germany!” whispered Lenore.

“I can’t say.  But men are all over, and these men work in secret.  There are American citizens in the Northwest—­one right in this valley—­who have plotted to ruin your father.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“No, I do not.”

“You are for Germany, of course?”

“I have been.  My people are German.  But I was born in the U.S.  And if it suits me I will be for America.  If you come with me I’ll throw up this dirty job, advise Glidden to shift the plot from your father to some other man—­”

“So it’s Glidden!” exclaimed Lenore.