come from the East, a man who had roused something in her never felt
before, a man who had said she was wonderful; and he needed someone to
take good care of him, to make him love life again. Abe would have been
all right if Lambton had never come, and she had meant to marry Abe in
the end; but it was different now, and Abe must get over it. Yet she had
told Abe to come back in an hour. He was sure to do it; and, when he had
done it, and found her gone on this errand, what would he do? She knew
what he would do. He would hurt someone. He would follow too. But at
Dingan's Drive, if she reached it before the troopers and before Abe,
and did the thing she had set out to do; and, because no whiskey could
be found, Lambton must go free; and they all stood there together, what
would be the end? Abe would be terrible; but she was going East, not
North, and when the time came she would face it and put things right
somehow.

The night seemed endless to her fixed and anxious eyes and mind, yet dawn
came, and there had fallen no sound of hoof-beats on her ear. The ridge
above Dingan's Drive was reached and covered, but yet there was no sign
of her pursuers. At Red Man's River she delivered her load of contraband
to the traders waiting for it, and saw it loaded into the boats and
disappear beyond the wooded bend above Dingan's.

Then she collapsed into the arms of her brother Bantry, and was carried,
fainting, into Dingan's Lodge. A half-hour later MacFee and his troopers
and Lambton came. MacFee grimly searched the post and the shore, but he
saw by the looks of all that he had been foiled. He had no proof of
anything, and Lambton must go free.

"You've fooled us," he said to Nance sourly, yet with a kind of
admiration too. "Through you they got away with it. But I wouldn't