He had lived an iniquitous life; he was inured to all except the worst forms of wickedness; but for the moment—­in love of his daughter—­he stood redeemed.  He was on the right side at last.  His hand drew back, and his face was like iron.

“Shut that foul mouth!” he cautioned, with a curious, deadly evenness of tone.  “I haven’t surrendered yet to you two wolves.  If one of you dares to lay a hand on Beatrice, I’ll kill him where he stands.”

Even as he spoke his thought went to his rifle, leaning against a dead log ten feet away.  This was the moment of test:  the jealousy and rivalry and hatred between himself and Ray had reached the crisis.  And the spirit of murder, terrible past any demon of the Pit, came stalking from the savage forest into the ruddy firelight.

Ray leered, his muscles bunching.  “And I say to you, you’re a dirty traitor too,” he answered.  “She ain’t your daughter any more.  She’s Ben Darby’s squaw.  She’s not fit for a white man to touch any more, for all her lies.  You say one word and you’ll get it too.”

And at that instant the speeding pace of time seemed to halt, showing this accursed scene, so savage and terrible in the eerie light of the camp fire, at the edge of the haunted, breathless darkness, in vivid and ghastly detail.  Neilson leaped forward with all his power; and if his blow had gone home, Ray would have been shattered beneath it like a tree in the lightning blast.  But Ray’s arms were incredibly swift, and his rifle leaped in his hands.

The barrel gleamed.  The roar reechoed in the silence.  Neilson’s head bowed strangely; and for a moment he stood swaying, a ghastly blankness on his face; then pitched forward in the dew-wet grass.

Beatrice’s last defense had fallen, seriously wounded; and Ray’s arm seized her as, screaming, she tried to flee.

XL

The shot that wounded Jeffery Neilson carried far through the forest aisles, reechoing against the hills, and arresting, for one breathless moment, all the business of the wilderness.  The feeding caribou swung his horns and tried to catch the scent; the moose, grubbing for water roots in the lake bottom, lifted his grotesque head and stood like a form in black iron.  It came clear as a voice to the cavern where Ben lay.

The man started violently in his cot.  His entire nervous system seemed to react.  Then there ensued a curious state in which his physical functions seemed to cease,—­his heart motionless in his breast, his body tensely rigid, his breath held.  There was an infinite straining and travail in his mind.

The truth was that the sound acted much as a powerful stimulant to his retarded nervous forces.  It was the one thing his resting nerve-system needed; it was as if chemicals were in suspension in a crucible, and at a slight jar of the glass they made mysterious union and expelled a precipitation.  Almost instantly he recognized the sound that had reached him, with a clear and unmistakable recognition such as he had not experienced since the night of the accident, as the report of a rifle.  His mind gave a great leap and remembered its familiar world.