Poor Dorothy knew that if help did not come speedily she would be undone.  She prayed for Divine aid.  She could not believe that God would look down from Heaven and see these fiends prevail.  God’s ways, she was aware, were sometimes inscrutable, and seemed to fall short of justice, but she knew that sooner or later they invariably worked out retributive justice more terrible than man’s.  This was to be made plain to her sooner than she imagined, and unexpectedly, as God’s ways occasionally are.

Leon descended, and his comrade, with an evil light in his eyes and an oath on his lips, came towards Dorothy to force her to jump on to the snowdrift; but villain number two stopped him.

“Ze gun, Lucien,” he said, “hand me ze gun first time.”

The half-breed grasped the Winchester by the barrel and handed it down to his comrade, but as he did so he was unaware of the fact that the lever, in pumping up a fresh cartridge, had also put the weapon on full cock.  Leon, in grasping it, did so clumsily, and inadvertently touched the trigger.  In an instant the death-fire spurted from the muzzle, and Lucien fell forward with a bullet through his brain.

Not always slow are the ways of Him Who said, “Vengeance is Mine.”

The girl sank back in horror at the sight.  To see a man sent to his account red-handed is a terrible thing.

The fatal shot was still ringing in her ears when another sound broke in upon the reverberating air.  It was the muffled drumming of hoofs and the hurried exclamations of voices which she recognised.  It was her father and the others returning with the horses.  She staggered to her feet again as best she could, for her hands, being tied behind her back, made rising a difficult matter.  She must have presented a strange sight to the party, bound as she was, and with her long hair streaming behind her.  She heard her father’s cry of apprehension, and the next moment she caught sight of the remaining rebel scuttling like a startled iguana towards the dense plantation, where it would have been quite possible for him to have eluded pursuit.  But before he reached it there was a sharp ping.  He threw up his hands and fell dead on his face.  Douglas had made sure of him.

“It’s all right, dad, and I’m not hurt,” said the girl reassuringly, as her father ran towards her with a look of anguish on his face.  “You just came in the nick of time; they were going to ambush you.  Don’t let the horses go too near the corral, as they will be stampeded again.  A dead bear is lying there.”

In a few minutes she had told her father what had occurred, and he had explained the delay.  It had been as the two rebels had said.  The horses had gone off the trail into a deep snowdrift, and it had required a great deal of hard work to get them out.  They had not heard the shot which Dorothy had fired at the bear, for the very sufficient reason that two bluffs intervened, and the fairly strong