away from him so that it fell into a fissure in the rock. He turned
again to watch Courtot coming on.

The eerie light of uncertainty which is neither day nor night lay
across the hills. It was utterly silent. Then, the rattle of stones
below; horse and rider were so close that they could see Longstreet's
upturned face. Courtot was close behind him; Courtot looked up and
they could see his face.

'You must go, now,' whispered Helen. 'You have promised me.'

'I am keeping my promise,' he said sternly. 'But I am not going to run
from him. You would hate me for being a coward, Helen.'

She looked at him, puzzled. Then she saw that the holster at his hip
was empty.

'Oh,' cried Helen wildly, 'not that! You must kill him, Alan. I was
mad with fear. I----'

Stopping the flow of her words there swept over her the paralyzing
certainty that it was useless to batter against fate; that a man's
destiny was not to be thrust aside by a woman's love. For out of the
silence there burst a sound which to her quivering nerves was fraught
with word of death; that sound which in countless human hearts presages
a death before the dawn--the long, lugubrious howling of a dog. It
seemed to her to burst out of the nothingness of the sky, to arise in
the void of an unseen ghostly world where spirit voices foretold the
onrush of destruction.