"Never mind," he answered; and, slinging his weapon over his
shoulder, strode off down the gorge and so away into the
heart of the mountains to the haunts of the wild beasts.
Amongst them all there was none so fierce and so dangerous as
himself.

The prediction of the Mormon was only too well fulfilled.
Whether it was the terrible death of her father or the
effects of the hateful marriage into which she had been
forced, poor Lucy never held up her head again, but pined
away and died within a month. Her sottish husband, who had
married her principally for the sake of John Ferrier's
property, did not affect any great grief at his bereavement;
but his other wives mourned over her, and sat up with her the
night before the burial, as is the Mormon custom. They were
grouped round the bier in the early hours of the morning,
when, to their inexpressible fear and astonishment, the door
was flung open, and a savage-looking, weather-beaten man in
tattered garments strode into the room. Without a glance or
a word to the cowering women, he walked up to the white
silent figure which had once contained the pure soul of Lucy
Ferrier. Stooping over her, he pressed his lips reverently
to her cold forehead, and then, snatching up her hand, he
took the wedding-ring from her finger. "She shall not be
buried in that," he cried with a fierce snarl, and before an
alarm could be raised sprang down the stairs and was gone.
So strange and so brief was the episode, that the watchers
might have found it hard to believe it themselves or persuade
other people of it, had it not been for the undeniable fact