against Jim’s coming.  It added a further note of apprehension, peering through the dark, still valley like a wakeful, anxious eye, keeping a long and unrewarded vigil.  Judith felt the consummation of the threatening tragedy after her first glimpse of the sentinel trees.  She could not explain, but her heart cried, even as the wind in them had sung of death.  Perhaps her mother’s spirit spoke to her, just as she had said, on that memorable drive, that the Great Mystery spoke to his people in the earth, the sky, and the frowning mountains.

“Peter”—­she had slid from her horse and was clinging to his arm—­“when it happens, Peter, you will have no part in it?”

“It won’t happen, Judith, if I can help it.”

She kissed his hand as it held the loose reins.

“Lord, I am not worthy!” was the thought in his heart.  He sat graven in the saddle.  Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart though he was, the unsought kiss of trust gifted him with a self-reverence that would not soon forsake him.

Judith was rapping on the door and calling to Alida not to be frightened.  And presently it was opened.  Peter wanted to leave Judith, now that she was safely at the end of her journey, but she would not hear of it till he had eaten.

“You would have had your comfortable supper five hours ago had you not been playing cavalier to me all over the wilderness.”  And Peter yielded.

Judith busied herself about the kitchen.  Her mood of racking apprehension had disappeared.  Indian stoicism had again the guiding hand.  She waved Peter from the fire that she was kindling, as if he were a blundering incompetent.  But she let him slice the bacon and grind the coffee as one lets a child help.  Alida came in, white-faced and anxious over the long absence of her husband, but conscientiously hospitable nevertheless.  Peter noticed that Judith made a gallant pretence of eating, crumbling her bread and talking the meanwhile.  The pale wife, who had little to say at the best of times, was put to the test to say anything at all.  But, withal, their intent was so genuinely hospitable that Peter himself could not speak with the pity of it.  Accustomed as he was to the roughness of these frontier cabins, never had he seen a human habitation so desolate as this.  The mud plaster had fallen away from between the logs, showing cross sections of the melancholy prospect.  An atmosphere of tragedy brooded over the place.  Whether from its long period of emptiness, or from the vaguely hinted murder of the woman who had died there, or whether it took its character from the prevailing desolation, the cabin in the valley was an unlovely thing.  Nor did the cleanliness, the conscientious making the best of things, soften the woful aspect of the place.  Rather was the appeal the more poignant to the seeing eye, as the brave makeshift of the self-respecting poor strikes deeper than the beggar’s whine.  The house was bare but for the few things that Alida