"Dead before he left the saddle," replied Vance, with his usual calm.
"And if the bullet hadn't finished him, the fall would have broken his
neck. But--what in the world! Did you know the fellow?"

He blinked at her, his amazement growing. The capable hands of Elizabeth
were pressed to her breast, and out of the thirty-five years of
spinsterhood which had starved her face he became aware of eyes young and
dark, and full of spirit; by no means the keen, quiet eyes of Elizabeth
Cornish.

"Do something," she cried. "Go down, and--if they've murdered him--"

He literally fled from the room.

All the time she was seeing nothing, but she would never forget what she
had seen, no matter how long she lived. Subconsciously she was fighting
to keep the street voices out of her mind. They were saying things she
did not wish to hear, things she would not hear. Finally, she recovered
enough to stand up and shut the window. That brought her a terrible
temptation to look down into the mass of men in the street--and women,
too!

But she resisted and looked up. The forms of the street remained
obscurely in the bottom of her vision, and made her think of something
she had seen in the woods--a colony of ants around a dead beetle.
Presently the door opened and Vance came back. He still seemed very
worried, but she forced herself to smile at him, and at once his concern
disappeared; it was plain that he had been troubled about her and not in
the slightest by the fate of the strange rider. She kept on smiling, but
for the first time in her life she really looked at Vance without