Finally, one Sunday morning, Dennis and Mamie met again.

“Holy Mackinaw!” exclaimed Dennis.

“Anything wrong?”

“Everything.”

“I don’t understand.”  But, of course, she did.

“It’s God’s truth, then, what the boys say?”

She hung her head.

“I thought he’d quit when I went up the river,” said Dennis.  “Say, let’s you an’ me skin out o’ this.  I’ll get my dough to-night.”

“Oh, Dennis!” she murmured, in piteous protestation, “we’d burn in eternal torment.”

“We’d burn together,” said Dennis.  “Anyways, if this ain’t torment, and if Barker ain’t Beelzebub himself, I’m a liar.”

She shook her head, with the tears streaming down her thin, white cheeks.

“Gee!” said Dennis, reduced to silence.

“I tuk him for better and worse,” sobbed Mamie.

“You might ha’ guessed that it would be worse,” growled Dennis.  Then, desperately, he blurted out, “Because you’re dead-set on keepin’ the seventh commandment, you’re jest naterally drivin’ me to break the sixth.”

“What?”

“I’ve said it.  And he saved my life, too.  But when I look at yer, I get to thinking.”  His voice sank to a hoarse whisper.  “I think lots, nights.  He comes back to ye alone, through them trees, and there’s one place where the pine needles is thick as moss.  And I mind me what a Dago told me onst.  He’d killed his man, he had, stabbed him from behind with a knife he showed me:  jest an ordinary knife, only sharp.  An’ he told me how he done it, whar to strike—­savvy?  It goes in slick!”

He stopped, seeing that Mamie was regarding him with wide-eyed horror and consternation.

“Dennis!”

“Yes, my name’s Dennis, right enough.  That’s the trouble.  I hav’n’t the nerve to kill Barker, and you hav’n’t the nerve to skip off with me.  Were two of a kind, Mamie, scairt to death of what comes after death.  And you know it.  So long!”

She caught at his arm.

“You ain’t a-goin’ to leave the inlet?”

“It’s a mighty big country, this,” Dennis replied austerely; “but I’ve a notion it ain’t quite big enough for Barker an’ me.  So long!”

“I’m comin’ up to-morrer, Dennis, to see ’em run the last rapid.  Mebbe you was fullish to leave the range?”

He marked the interrogation in her tone, and answered, for him, almost roughly—­

“Mebbe I was, but not so fullish as you by a long sight!”

With that he returned to the bunk-house.

* * * * *