“I know that he found Jane as he wanted to find her, and he is happy.  I think he has gone out there alone—­to cry.”  And for a time after that, as he sat in the gloom, John Aldous knew that Joanne was sobbing like a little child in the spruce and cedar shelter he had built for her.

CHAPTER XXVIII

If MacDonald slept at all that night Aldous did not know it.  The old mountaineer watched until a little after twelve in the deep shadow of a rock between the two camps.

“I can’t sleep,” he protested, when Aldous urged him to take his rest.  “I might take a little stroll up the plain, Johnny—­but I can’t sleep.”

The plain lay in a brilliant starlight at this hour; they could see the gleam of the snow-peaks—­the light was almost like the glow of the moon.

“There’ll be plenty of sleep after to-morrow,” added MacDonald, and there was a finality in his voice and words which set the other’s blood stirring.

“You think they will show up to-morrow?”

“Yes.  This is the same valley the cabins are in, Johnny.  That big mountain runs out an’ splits it, an’ it curves like a horseshoe.  From that mount’in we can see them, no matter which way they come.  They’ll go straight to the cabins.  There’s a deep little run under the slope.  You didn’t see it when we came out, but it’ll take us within a hunderd yards of ’em.  An’ at a hunderd yards——­”

He shrugged his shoulders suggestively in the starlight, and there was a smile on his face.

“It seems almost like murder,” shuddered Aldous.

“But it ain’t,’” replied MacDonald quickly.  “It’s self-defence!  If we don’t do it, Johnny—­if we don’t draw on them first, what happened there forty years ago is goin’ to happen again—­with Joanne!”

“A hundred yards,” breathed Aldous, his jaws setting hard.  “And there are five!”

“They’ll go into the cabins,” said MacDonald.  “At some time there will be two or three outside, an’ we’ll take them first.  At the sound of the shots the others will run out, and it will be easy.  Yo’ can’t very well miss a man at a hunderd yards, Johnny?”

“No, I won’t miss.”

MacDonald rose.

“I’m goin’ to take a little stroll, Johnny.”

For two hours after that Aldous was alone.  He knew why old Donald could not sleep, and where he had gone, and he pictured him sitting before the little old cabin in the starlit valley communing with the spirit of Jane.  And during those two hours he steeled himself for the last time to the thing that was going to happen when the day came.

It was nearly three o’clock when MacDonald returned.  It was four o’clock before he roused Joanne; and it was five o’clock when they had eaten their breakfast, and MacDonald prepared to leave for the mountain with his telescope.  Aldous had observed Joanne talking to him for several minutes alone, and he had also observed that her eyes were very bright, and that there was an unusual eagerness in her manner of listening to what the old man was saying.  The significance of this did not occur to him when she urged him to accompany MacDonald.