“If it prove to be a lure, such as was used to the undoing of Sheriff Churchill, there is some small chance I shall not return. Naturally I shall observe every caution. But if precautions fail and I do not return, you will find in a box in my room such evidence and information as I have collected. It does not reach the man we wish to reach, but it moves toward him. I hope you will be able to make use of it.” He could write so stiltedly of making use of his work when he was, open-eyed, going out to walk into the trap prepared for her! “Therefore,” the letter concluded, “good-by. My going will mean little to you; it means little to me, except the parting from you. If you find time to think of me at all, I hope you will think of me as continuing always to love you wherever it may be I have journeyed. Good-by.” At the end he had signed his name. She sat for a moment as though turned to stone. Her heart was dead, her faculties benumbed.... He was dead! She had found and read the letter, so he must be dead--vanished as Sheriff Churchill had vanished, never to be seen again by mortal eye.... And for her! He had gone out calmly, serenely, to face whatever might beset his path--for her. He had given his life for her, to preserve her life! She sat very still. Her cheeks were white and she was cold, cold as death. No sound came from her compressed lips. Dead!... Evan Pell was dead! Then something not of her own consciousness, something deep within the machinery of her soul, moved and controlled her. She acted, but not as one acts of his own volition, rather as one acts in a mesmeric trance.... Her impulse was to go to find him--to find him, to weep over him ... to avenge him! She snatched the receiver from its hook and telephoned Jared Whitefield again. He would help. He would know what to do. But Jared Whitefield had not returned.... She must act alone. Calmly, like an automaton, she put on her hat, extinguished the lights, locked the door, and walked up the street. The direction she took was toward the Lakeside Hotel. She reached the fringe of the village which bordered upon the black woods, but did not pause. Steadily, urged on by some inexorable force, she continued down that gloomy avenue, between woodland banks of inky blackness.... She neither hesitated nor paused nor looked behind her. Had she looked behind it may have been she would have seen the shadowy figures of two men who followed, followed stealthily keeping always a stated distance, drawing no nearer, flitting at the edge of the blackness. CHAPTER XXII