“Mind ye say what ye said this morning to nobody else,” he said, as he went out the door.

“I’ll say it with my dying breath,” returned Madelon, and she caught her breath, as if it were indeed her last, as she spoke.

“Accuse yourself of murder, would ye, and be hung, and leave your own kith and kin with nobody to keep house for them, for the sake of a man that’s left ye for another girl!”

“Father, I tell you that I did it!”

But David clapped to the door on her speech, and the awful truth of it seemed to smite her in her own face.

Madelon went up-stairs, and brushed and braided her black hair before her glass; but the face therein did not look like her own to her, and she felt all the time as if she were braiding and wreathing the hair around another’s head.  One of those deeds had she committed which lead a man to see suddenly the stranger that abides always in his flesh and in his own soul, and makes him realize that of all the millions of earth there is not one that he knows not better than his own self, nor whose face can look so strange to him in the light of his own actions.

Madelon put her red cloak over her shoulders as she might have put it on a lay-figure, and tied on her hood.  Then she went down-stairs, out of the house to the barn, and put the side-saddle on the roan mare.

Not another woman in the village, and scarcely a man except the Hautville sons, would have dared to ride this roan, with the backward roll of her vicious eyes and her wicked, flat-laid ears; but Madelon Hautville could not be thrown.

The mare, when she was saddled, danced an iron-bound dance in the barn bay, but Madelon bade her stand still, and she obeyed, her nostrils quivering, the breath coming from them in a snort of smoke, and every muscle under her roan hide vibrating.

Then Madelon placed her foot in the stirrup, and was in the saddle, pulling the bit hard against the jaw, and the mare shot out of the barn with a fierce lash-out of her heels and an upheaval of her gaunt roan flanks that threatened to dash the girl’s head against the lintel of the door.

But Madelon knew with what she had to do, and she bent low in the saddle and passed out in safety.  Then she spared not the mare for nigh three miles on the New Salem road.  It was ten miles to New Salem, and it did not take long to reach it, riding a horse who went at times as if all the fiends were in chase, and often sprang out like a bow into the wayside bushes, and was off with a new spurt of vicious terror.  It was still far from sundown when Madelon Hautville tied the roan outside the jail where Burr Gordon lay.

Burr was sitting in his cell, which was nothing but a rough chamber with whitewashed walls and a grated window.  It was furnished with a bed, a table, and a chair.  He had an inkstand and a great sheet of paper on the table, and he was writing a letter when the bolt shot and the jailer entered with Madelon Hautville.