She would not answer. He was asking more than he knew. Why should she
be sacrificed? Was it her duty to pay the "little gal's debt," to save
the man at Bindon? To-morrow was to be the great day in her own life.
The one man in all the world was coming to marry her to-morrow. After
four years' waiting, after a bitter quarrel in which both had been to
blame, he was coming from the mining town of Selby to marry her to-
morrow.

"What will happen? Why will your friend lose his life if you don't get
to Bindon?"

"By noon to-morrow, by twelve o'clock noon; that's the plot; that's what
they've schemed. Three days ago, I heard. I got a man free from trouble
North--he was no good, but I thought he ought to have another chance, and
I got him free. He told me of what was to be done at Bindon. There'd
been a strike in the mine, an' my friend had took it in hand with
knuckle-dusters on. He isn't the kind to fell a tree with a jack-knife.
Then three of the strikers that had been turned away--they was the
ringleaders--they laid a plan that'd make the devil sick. They've put a
machine in the mine, an' timed it, an' it'll go off when my friend comes
out of the mine at noon to-morrow."

Her face was pale now, and her eyes had a look of pain and horror. Her
man--him that she was to marry--was the head of a mine also at Selby,
forty miles beyond Bindon, and the horrible plot came home to her with
piercing significance.

"Without a second's warning," he urged, "to go like that, the man that
was so good to my little gal, an' me with a chance to save him, an'