“Let him take me away?  Ah, yes.  For what?”

“To save you,” said Dunn.  “Look here, Teresa!  Without knowing it, you lifted me out of hell just now, and because of the wrong I might have done her—­for her sake, I spare you and shirk my duty.”

“For her sake!” gasped the woman—­“for her sake!  Oh, yes!  Go on.”

“Well,” said Dunn gloomily, “I reckon perhaps you’d as lieve left me in hell, for all the love you bear me.  And may be you’ve grudge enough agin me still to wish I’d found her and him together.”

“You think so?” she said, turning her head away.

“There, d—­n it!  I didn’t mean to make you cry.  May be you wouldn’t, then.  Only tell that fellow to take you out of this, and not run away the next time he sees a man coming.”

“He didn’t run,” said Teresa, with flashing eyes.  “I—­I—­I sent him away,” she stammered.  Then, suddenly turning with fury upon him, she broke out, “Run!  Run from you!  Ha, ha!  You said just now I’d a grudge against you.  Well, listen, Jim Dunn.  I’d only to bring you in range of that young man’s rifle, and you’d have dropped in your tracks like—­”

“Like that bar, the other night,” said Dunn, with a short laugh.  “So that was your little game?” He checked his laugh suddenly—­a cloud passed over his face.  “Look here, Teresa,” he said, with an assumption of carelessness that was as transparent as it was utterly incompatible with his frank, open selfishness.  “What became of that bar?  The skin—­eh?  That was worth something?”

“Yes,” said Teresa quietly.  “Low exchanged it and got a ring for me from that trader Isaacs.  It was worth more, you bet.  And the ring didn’t fit either—­”

“Yes,” interrupted Dunn, with an almost childish eagerness.

“And I made him take it back, and get the value in money.  I hear that Isaacs sold it again and made another profit; but that’s like those traders.”  The disingenuous candor of Teresa’s manner was in exquisite contrast to Dunn.  He rose and grasped her hand so heartily she was forced to turn her eyes away.

“Good-by!” he said.

“You look tired,” she murmured, with a sudden gentleness that surprised him; “let me go with you a part of the way.”

“It isn’t safe for you just now,” he said, thinking of the possible consequences of the alarm Brace had raised.

“Not the way you came,” she replied; “but one known only to myself.”

He hesitated only a moment.  “All right, then,” he said finally, “let us go at once.  It’s suffocating here, and I seem to feel this dead bark crinkle under my feet.”

She cast a rapid glance around her, and then seemed to sound with her eyes the far-off depths of the aisles, beginning to grow pale with the advancing day, but still holding a strange quiver of heat in the air.  When she had finished her half-abstracted scrutiny of the distance, she cast one backward glance at her own cabin and stopped.