Whispering Winds glanced over her shoulder with a startled cry, which ended in a scream.

Not two yards behind her stood Jim Girty.

Hideous was his face in its triumphant ferocity.  He held a long knife in his hand, and, snarling like a mad wolf, he made a forward lunge.

Joe raised himself quickly; but almost before he could lift his hand in defense, the long blade was sheathed in his breast.

Slowly he sank back, his gray eyes contracting with the old steely flash.  The will to do was there, but the power was gone forever.

“Remember, Girty, murderer!  I am Wetzel’s friend,” he cried, gazing at his slayer with unutterable scorn.

Then the gray eyes softened, and sought the blanched face of the stricken maiden.

“Winds,” he whispered faintly.

She was as one frozen with horror.

The gray eyes gazed into hers with lingering tenderness; then the film of death came upon them.

The renegade raised his bloody knife, and bent over the prostrate form.

Whispering Winds threw herself upon Girty with the blind fury of a maddened lioness.  Cursing fiercely, he stabbed her once, twice, three times.  She fell across the body of her lover, and clasped it convulsively.

Girty gave one glance at his victims; deliberately wiped the gory knife on Wind’s leggins, and, with another glance, hurried and fearful, around the glade, he plunged into the thicket.

An hour passed.  A dark stream crept from the quiet figures toward the spring.  It dyed the moss and the green violet leaves.  Slowly it wound its way to the clear water, dripping between the pale blue flowers.  The little fall below the spring was no longer snowy white; blood had tinged it red.

A dog came bounding into the glade.  He leaped the brook, hesitated on the bank, and lowered his nose to sniff at the water.  He bounded up the bank to the cavern.

A long, mournful howl broke the wilderness’s quiet.

Another hour passed.  The birds were silent; the insects still.  The sun sank behind the trees, and the shades of evening gathered.

The ferns on the other side of the glade trembled.  A slight rustle of dead leaves disturbed the stillness.  The dog whined, then barked.  The tall form of a hunter rose out of the thicket, and stepped into the glade with his eyes bent upon moccasin tracks in the soft moss.

The trail he had been following led him to this bloody spring.

“I might hev knowed it,” he muttered.

Wetzel, for it was he, leaned upon his long rifle while his keen eyes took in the details of the tragedy.  The whining dog, the bloody water, the motionless figures lying in a last embrace, told the sad story.

“Joe an’ Winds,” he muttered.

Only a moment did he remain lost in sad reflection.  A familiar moccasin-print in the sand on the bank pointed westward.  He examined it carefully.