“Oh!” gasped Roy.

Beulah went to her lover arrow-swift.

“My dear . . . my dear!  What does it matter now?  Dad says my father was killed in fair fight.  He had set himself against the law.  It took his life.  Your father didn’t.”

“But—­”

“Oh, his was the hand.  But he was sheriff.  He did only his duty.  That’s true, isn’t it, dad?”

“I reckon.”

Her strong young hands gripped tightly those of her lover.  She looked proudly into his eyes with that little flare of feminine ferocity in hers.

“I won’t have it any other way, Roy Beaudry.  You’re the man I’m going to marry, the man who is going to be the father of my children if God gives me any.  No blood stands between us—­nothing but the memory of brave men who misunderstood each other and were hurt because of it.  Our marriage puts an end forever to even the memory of the wrong they did each other.  That is the way it is to me—­and that’s the way it has got to be to you, too.”

Roy laughed softly, tears in his eyes.  As he looked at her eager young beauty the hot life in his pulses throbbed.  He snatched her to him with an ardor as savage as her own.

THE END

OF THE BEGINNING