At the street corner Hare glanced back.  Yelling men were rushing from the saloon and some of them fired after him.  The bullets whistled harmlessly behind Hare.  Then the corner house shut off his view.

Silvermane lengthened out and stretched lower with his white mane flying and his nose pointed level for the desert.

XI THE DESERT-HAWK

Toward the close of the next day Jack Hare arrived at Seeping Springs.  A pile of gray ashes marked the spot where the trimmed logs had lain.  Round the pool ran a black circle hard packed into the ground by many hoofs.  Even the board flume had been burned to a level with the glancing sheet of water.  Hare was slipping Silvermane’s bit to let him drink when he heard a halloo.  Dave Naab galloped out of the cedars, and presently August Naab and his other sons appeared with a pack-train.

“Now you’ve played bob!” exclaimed Dave.  He swung out of his saddle and gripped Hare with both hands.  “I know what you’ve done; I know where you’ve been.  Father will be furious, but don’t you care.”

The other Naabs trotted down the slope and lined their horses before the pool.  The sons stared in blank astonishment; the father surveyed the scene slowly, and then fixed wrathful eyes on Hare.

“What does this mean?” he demanded, with the sonorous roll of his angry voice.

Hare told all that had happened.

August Naab’s gloomy face worked, and his eagle-gaze had in it a strange far-seeing light; his mind was dwelling upon his mystic power of revelation.

“I see—­I see,” he said haltingly.

“Ki—­yi-i-i!” yelled Dave Naab with all the power of his lungs.  His head was back, his mouth wide open, his face red, his neck corded and swollen with the intensity of his passion.

“Be still—­boy!” ordered his father.  “Hare, this was madness—­but tell me what you learned.”

Briefly Hare repeated all that he had been told at the Bishop’s, and concluded with the killing of Martin Cole by Dene.

August Naab bowed his head and his giant frame shook under the force of his emotion.  Martin Cole was the last of his life-long friends.

“This—­this outlaw—­you say you ran him down?” asked Naab, rising haggard and shaken out of his grief.

“Yes.  He didn’t recognize me or know what was coming till Silvermane was on him.  But he was quick, and fell sidewise.  Silvermane’s knee sent him sprawling.”

“What will it all lead to?” asked August Naab, and in his extremity he appealed to his eldest son.

“The bars are down,” said Snap Naab, with a click of his long teeth.

“Father,” began Dave Naab earnestly, “Jack has done a splendid thing.  The news will fly over Utah like wildfire.  Mormons are slow.  They need a leader.  But they can follow and they will.  We can’t cure these evils by hoping and praying.  We’ve got to fight!”