The day was quite dead when Dave Turner reached his post on top of the ridge. The gray of twilight had passed, the forest was lost in darkness, the stars were all out. The only vestige of daylight that remained was a pale, red glow over the Western mountains,—and this was more like red flowers that had been placed on its grave in remembrance.

Fortunately, the moon rose early. Otherwise Dave's watch would have been in vain. The soft light wrought strange miracles in the forest: bathing the tree tops in silver, laying wonderful cobweb tapestries between the trunks, upsetting the whole perspective as to distance and contour. Dave didn't have long to wait. At the end of a half-hour he saw, through the field glasses, the wavering of a strange black shadow on the distant meadow. Only the vivid quality of the full moon enabled him to see it at all.

He tried to get a better focus. It might be just the shadow of deer, come to browse on the parched grass. Dave felt a little tremor of excitement at the thought that if it were not Bruce, it was more likely the last of the grizzlies, the Killer. The previous night the gray forest king had made an excursion into Simon's pastures and had killed a yearling calf; in all probability he would return to-night to finish his feast. In fact, this night would in all probability see the end of the Killer. Some one of the Turners would wait for him, with a loaded rifle, in a safe ambush.

But it wasn't the Killer, after all. It was before his time; besides, the shadow was too slender to be that of the huge bear. Dave Turner watched a moment longer, so that there could be no possibility of a mistake. Bruce was returning; he was little more than a half-hour's walk from Linda's home.

Turner swung on his horse, then lashed the animal into a gallop. Less than five minutes later he drew up to a halt beneath the Sentinel Pine, almost a mile distant. For the first time, Dave began to move cautiously.

It would complicate matters if the two women had already gone to bed. The hour was early—not yet nine—but the fall of darkness is often the going-to-bed time of the mountain people. It is warmer there and safer; and the expense of candles is lessened. Incidentally, it is the natural course for the human breed,—to bed at nightfall and up at dawn; and only distortion of nature can change the habit. It is doubtful if even the earliest men—those curious, long-armed, stiff-thumbed, heavy-jowled forefathers far remote—were ever night hunters. Like the hawks and most of the other birds of prey they were content to leave the game trails to the beasts at night. As life in the mountains gets down to a primitive basis, most of the hill people soon fall into this natural course. But to-night Linda and old Elmira were sitting up, waiting for Bruce's return.

A candle flame flickered at the window. Dave went up to the door and knocked.

"Who's there?" Elmira called. It was a habit learned in the dreadful days of twenty years ago, not to open a door without at least some knowledge of who stood without. A lighted doorway sets off a target almost as well as a field of white sets off a black bull's-eye.

Dave knew that truth was the proper course. "Dave Turner," he replied.

A long second of heavy, strange silence ensued. Then the woman spoke again. There was a new note in her voice, a curious hoarseness, but at the same time a sense of exultation and excitement. But Dave didn't notice it. Perhaps the oaken door that the voice came through stripped away all the overtones; possibly his own perceptions were too blunt to receive it. He might, however, have been interested in the singular look of wonder that flashed over Linda's face as she stared at her aged aunt. Linda was not thinking of Dave. She had forgotten that he stood outside. His visit was the last thing that either of them expected—except, perhaps, on some such deadly business as the clan had come years before—yet she found no space in her thought for him. Her whole attention was seized and held by the unfamiliar note in her aunt's voice, and a strange drawing of the woman's features that the closed door prevented Dave from seeing. It was a look almost of rapture, hardly to be expected in the presence of an enemy. The dim eyes seemed to glow in the shadows. It was the look of one who had wandered steep and unknown trails for uncounted years and sees the distant lights of his home at last.

She got up from her chair and moved over to the little pack she had carried on her back when she had walked up from her cabin. Linda still gazed at her in growing wonder. The long years seemed to have fallen away from her; she slipped across the uncarpeted floor with the agility and silence of a tiger. She always had given the impression of latent power, but never so much as now. She took some little object from the bag and slipped it next to her withered and scrawny breast.

"What do you want?" she called out into the gloom.

Dave had been getting a little restless in the silence; but the voice reassured him. "I'll tell you when you open the door. It's something about Bruce."

Linda remembered him then. She leaped to the door and flung it wide. She saw the stars without, the dark fringe of pines against the sky line behind. She felt the wind and the cool breath of the darkness. But most of all she saw the cunning, sharp-featured face of Dave Turner, with the candlelight upon him. The yellow beams were in his eyes too. They seemed full of guttering lights.

The few times that Linda had talked to Dave she had always felt uneasy beneath his speculative gaze. The same sensation swept over her now. She knew perfectly what she would have had to expect, long since, from this man, were it not that he had lived in fear of his brother Simon. The mighty leader of the clan had set a barrier around her as far as personal attentions went,—and his reasons were obvious. The mountain girls do not usually attain her perfection of form and face; his desire for her was as jealous as it was intense and real. This dark-hearted man of great and terrible emotions did not only know how to hate. In his own savage way he could love too. Linda hated and feared him, but the emotion was wholly different from the dread and abhorrence with which she regarded Dave. "What about Bruce?" she demanded.

Dave leered. "Do you want to see him? He's lying—up here on the hill."

The tone was knowing, edged with cruelty; and it had the desired effect. The color swept from the girl's face. In a single fraction of an instant it showed stark white in the candlelight.

There was an instant's sensation of terrible cold. But her voice was hard and lifeless when she spoke.

"You mean you've killed him?" she asked simply.

"We ain't killed him. We've just been teaching him a lesson," Dave explained. "Simon warned him not to come up—and we've had to talk to him a little—with fists and heels."

Linda cried out then, one agonized syllable. She knew what fists and heels could do in the fights between the mountain men. They are as much weapons of torture as the claws and fangs of the Killer. She had an instant's dread picture of this strong man of hers lying maimed and broken, a battered, whimpering, ineffective thing in the moonlight of some distant hillside. The vision brought knowledge to her. Even more clearly than in the second of their kiss, before he had gone to see Hudson, she realized what an immutable part of her he was. She gazed with growing horror at Dave's leering face. "Where is he?" she asked. She remembered, with singular steadfastness, the pistol she had concealed in her own room.

"I'll show you. If you want to get him in you'd better bring the old hag with you. It'll take two of you to carry him."

"I'll come," the old woman said from across the shadowed room. She spoke with a curious breathlessness. "I'll go at once."

The door closed behind the three of them, and they went out into the moonlit forest. Dave walked first. There was an unlooked-for eagerness in his motions, but Linda thought that she understood it. It was wholly characteristic of him that he should find a degenerate rapture in showing these two women the terrible handiwork of the Turners. He rejoiced in just this sort of cruelty. She had no suspicion that this excursion was only a pretext to get the two women away from the house, and that his eagerness arose from deeper causes. It was true that Dave exulted in the work, and strangely the fact that it was part of the plot against Bruce had been almost forgotten in the face of a greater emotion. He was alone in the darkness with Linda—except of course for a helpless old woman—and the command of Simon in regard to his attitude toward her seemed suddenly dim and far away. He led them over a hill, into the deeper forest.

He walked swiftly, eagerly; the two women could hardly keep pace with him. He left the dim trail and skirted about the thickets. No cry for help could carry from this lonely place. No watchman on a hill could see what transpired in the heavy coverts.

So intent was he that he quite failed to observe a singular little signal between old Elmira and Linda. The woman half turned about, giving the girl an instant's glimpse of something that she transferred from her breast to her sleeve. It was slender and of steel, and it caught the moonlight on its shining surface.

The girl's eyes glittered when she beheld it. She nodded, scarcely perceptibly, and the strange file plunged deeper into the shadows.

Fifteen minutes later Dave drew up to a halt in a little patch of moonlight, surrounded by a wall of low trees and brush.

"There's more than one way to make a date for a walk with a pretty girl," he said.

The girl stared coldly into his eyes. "What do you mean?" she asked.

The man laughed harshly. "I mean that Bruce ain't got back yet—he's still on the other side of Little River, for all I know—"

"Then why did you bring us here?"

"Just to be sociable," Dave returned. "I'll tell you, Linda. I wanted to talk to you. I ain't been in favor of a lot of things Simon's been doing—to you and your people. I thought maybe you and I would like to be—friends."

No one could mistake the emotion behind the strained tone, the peculiar languor in the furtive eyes. The girl drew back, shuddering. "I'm going back," she told him.

"Wait. I'll take you back soon. Let's have a kiss and make friends. The old lady won't look—"

He laughed again, a hoarse sound that rang far through the silences. He moved toward her, hands reaching. She backed away. Then she half-tripped over an outstretched root.

The next instant she was in his arms, struggling against their steel. She didn't waste words in pleading. A sob caught at her throat, and she fought with all her strength against the drawn, nearing face. She had forgotten Elmira; in this dreadful moment of terror and danger the old woman's broken strength seemed too little to be of aid. And Dave thought her as helpless to oppose him as the tall pines that watched from above them.

His wild laughter obscured the single sound that she made, a strange cry that seemed lacking in all human quality. Rather it was such a sound as a puma utters as it leaps upon its prey. It was the articulation of a whole life of hatred that had come to a crisis at last,—of deadly and terrible triumph after a whole decade of waiting. If Dave had discerned that cry in time he would have hurled Linda from his arms to leap into a position of defense. The desire for women in men goes down to the roots of the world, but self-preservation is a deeper instinct still.

But he didn't hear it in time. Elmira had not struck with her knife. The distance was too far for that. But she swung her cane with all her force. The blow caught the man at the temple, his arms fell away from the girl's body, he staggered grotesquely in the carpet of pine needles. Then he fell face downward.

"His belt, quick!" the woman cried. No longer was her voice that of decrepit age. The girl struggled with herself, wrenched back her self-control, and leaped to obey her aunt. They snatched the man's belt from about his waist, and the women locked it swiftly about his ankles. With strong, hard hands they drew his wrists back of him and tied them tight with the long bandana handkerchief he wore about his neck. They worked almost in silence, with incredible rapidity and deftness.

The man was waking now, stirring in his unconsciousness, and swiftly the old woman cut the buckskin thongs from his tall logging boots. These also she twisted about the wrists, knotting them again and again, and pulling them so tight they were almost buried in the lean flesh. Then they turned him face upward to the moon.

The two women stood an instant, breathing hard. "What now?" Linda asked. And a shiver of awe went over her at the sight of the woman's face.

"Nothing more, Linda," she answered, in a distant voice. "Leave Dave Turner to me."

It was a strange picture. Womanhood—the softness and tenderness which men have learned to associate with the name—seemed fallen away from Linda and Elmira. They were only avengers,—like the she-bear that fights for her cubs or the she-wolf that guards the lair. There was no more mercy in them than in the females of the lower species. The moon flooded the place with silver, the pines were dark and impassive as ever above them.

Dave wakened. They saw him stir. They watched him try to draw his arms from behind him. It was just a faint, little-understanding pull at first. Then he wrenched and tugged with all his strength, flopping strangely in the dirt. The effort increased until it was some way suggestive of an animal in the death struggle,—a fur bearer dying in the trap.

Terror was upon him. It was in his wild eyes and his moonlit face; it was in the desperation and frenzy of his struggles. And the two women saw it and smiled into each other's eyes.

Slowly his efforts ceased. He lay still in the pine needles. He turned his head, first toward Linda, then to the inscrutable, dark face of the old woman. As understanding came to him, the cold drops emerged upon his swarthy skin.

"Good God!" he asked. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going back," Linda answered. "You had some other purpose in bringing me out here—or you wouldn't have brought Elmira, too. I'm going back to wait for Bruce."

"And you and I will linger here," Elmira told him. "We have many things to say to each other. We have many things to do. About my Abner—there are many things you'll want to hear of him."

The last vestige of the man's spirit broke beneath the words. Abner had been old Elmira's son,—a youth who had laughed often, and the one hope of the old woman's declining years. And he had fallen before Dave's ambush in a half-forgotten fight of long years before.

The man shivered in his bonds. Linda turned to go. The silence of the wilderness deepened about them. "Oh, Linda, Linda," the man called. "Don't leave me. Don't leave me here with her!" he pleaded. "Please—please don't leave me in this devil's power. Make her let me go."

But Linda didn't seem to hear. The brush crackled and rustled; and the two—this dark-hearted man and the avenger—were left together.