His eyes grew wistful.

“Between friends—­as a son to his future father,” he said softly, “can’t you tell me what the charm was that you used on.  Nick to send him away?  I watched him come out of the shack.  He was in a fury.  I could see that by the way his head thrust out between his big shoulders.  And when he went down the hill he was striding like a giant, but every now and then he would stop short, and his head would go up as if he were tempted to turn around and go back, but didn’t quite have the nerve.  Donnegan, tell me the trick of it?”

“Willingly.  I appealed to his gambling instinct.”

“Which leaves me as much in the dark as ever.”

But Donnegan smiled in his own peculiar and mirthless manner and he went on to the hut.  Not that he expected a cheery greeting from Lou Macon, but he was drawn by the same perverse instinct which tempts a man to throw himself from a great height.  At the door he paused a moment.  He could distinguish no words, but he caught the murmur of Lou’s voice as she talked to Jack Landis, and it had that infinitely gentle quality which only a woman’s voice can have, and only when she nurses the sick.  It was a pleasant torture to Donnegan to hear it.  At length he summoned his resolution and tapped at the door.

The voice of Lou Macon stopped.  He heard a hurried and whispered consultation.  What did they expect?  Then swift foot-falls on the floor, and she opened the door.  There was a smile of expectancy on her lips; her eyes were bright; but when she saw Donnegan her lips pinched in.  She stared at him as if he were a ghost.

“I knew; I knew!” she said piteously, falling back a step but still keeping her hand upon the knob of the door as if to block the way to Donnegan.  “Oh, Jack, he has killed Lord Nick and now he is here—­”

To do what?  To kill Landis in turn?  Her horrified eyes implied as much.  He saw Landis in the distance raise himself upon one elbow and his face was gray, not with pain but with dread.

“It can’t be!” groaned Landis.

“Lord Nick is alive,” said Donnegan.  “And I have not come here to torment you; I have only come to ask that you let me speak with you alone for a moment, Lou!”

He watched her face intently.  All the cabin was in deep shadow, but the golden hair of the girl glowed as if with an inherent light of its own, and the same light touched her face.  Jack Landis was stricken with panic:  he stammered in a dreadful eagerness of fear.

“Don’t leave me, Lou.  You know what it means.  He wants to get you out of the way so that the colonel can be alone with me.  Don’t go, Lou!  Don’t go!”

As though she saw how hopeless it was to try to bar Donnegan by closing the door against him, she fell back to the bed.  She kept her eye on the little man, as if to watch against a surprise attack, and, fumbling behind her, her hand found the hand of Landis and closed over it with the reassurance of a mother.