He tied the horse to a sapling with a slip knot and stepped forward. He guessed that murder had been done. The shriek that still rang in his brain had come from a man in mortal agony. Warily as a panther he moved, for he knew the murderer had a rifle, and against a rifle at a hundred yards a forty-five is as effective as a popgun. Hugh edged round the corner of the bend beyond the cut. Instantly caution vanished. In the gathering gloom a woman was flying down the road toward him. She flung herself down to gather up in her arms a figure lying sprawled across the path. McClintock broke into a run. Even in the growing darkness he had recognized that light and lissom form. “Vicky!” he cried as he reached her. A face bloodless to the lips looked up pitifully at him. In the eyes he read amazement, incredulity, doubt. Then, quite without warning, the girl quietly toppled over in a dead faint. CHAPTER XLIII THE SACRIFICE Vicky floated back to consciousness and a world that for a moment did not relate itself to her previous experience. Hugh McClintock’s arms were round her, his anxious face looking into hers. The touch of the night wind was in the air, and apparently she was lying on the ground. “Where am I?” she asked. “You fainted,” he explained. “Oh!” she said vaguely. Then her eyes fell upon the still body stretched beside her. Her memory picked up lost threads again and she shuddered. “I—I thought—it was you.” She clung to him, her arms round him, as though she had not yet fully escaped from the horror that had held her. “Thought it was me?” he said, and there was not such a thing as grammar in the world just then. “Why should you think that?” “They meant to—to—kill you. One of my little boys heard them.” She began to sob softly into his coat. Hugh’s arms tightened about her. His body glowed with a soft warm happiness. He had never known Vicky before unstrung and helpless. It was golden luck for him that he should be the man to whom she clung. “How could they know I’d be here?” he asked gently. “Didn’t you get a note? Bob Dodson wrote it.” “A decoy, to bring me here?” “Yes. They pretended it was from me.” She disengaged herself from his arms. The instinct of sex defence against even the favoured lover was reasserting itself. Hugh tried to put the bits of the puzzle together. His eyes fell upon the dead body at his feet. “Then—this man—they must have shot him in place of me.” “Yes,” her dry throat gasped out. McClintock stooped to feel the heart. It did not beat. He turned the body for a look at the face. Then, “God!” he cried. The face that stared up at him with sightless eyes was the face of Ralph Dodson. Vicky wailed in distress. “Oh, Hugh! I did it. I killed him! I brought him here.” “How? What do you mean?” She caught her hands together in a gesture of despair. “I sent Tommie for him—told him to come. I wanted him to save you.”