“Ye don’t kerry straight. I ’member yer tricks. I reckon he hev got a six-shooter, but I’ll resk ye, ennyhows. I’ll wait till he kems across an’ then dare him to fight.” As he waited it might have seemed that he was the only human creature in the world, so desolately vacant were the barren mists, so unresponsive to the sense of the landscape that they hid, so null, so silent, save for the river, forever flowing on like life, resistless as eternity. The interval was long to his impatience,—so long that, alarmed at last lest his revenge be snatched from him by some mischance, at this supreme moment when it had seemed the fierce joy he had craved was vouchsafed, he hastily rode along the clifty bank above the tumultuous current. Once more the mist lifted. Suddenly he saw the roan colt, his full eyes starting from his head, his scream almost human in its frantic terror, pawing the cliffs, to the base of which the encroaching waters had risen; finding no footing, no shallows, only the forbidding inaccessibilities of the rocks. The saddle was vacant. The rider had been swept away by the wanton vagaries of the current. The young mountaineer stared stolidly and uncomprehendingly for a moment. In a sort of daze he dismounted from his horse. He hardly realized what had happened, until, as he climbed deftly down among the splintered crags, lithe, agile, sure-footed as a deer, he saw clinging to a bramble growing from a fissure, and supported on a ledge of the rock, the unconscious figure familiar to his dream of vengeance. It was forestalled! The wild freak of the mountain torrent had given him his heart’s desire, and yet his hands were clean. The wolves, the wild dogs, and the vultures would not leave the man to creep away were there yet life left in him. And there was life. He noted the convulsive fluttering of breath, the trembling clutch of the fingers; for the nerves remembered the saving boughs that the senses had forgotten. As Mink stood looking down he suddenly lifted his head with a quick start, as if a word had been spoken to him from out the silence. Why this gratuity of pity, this surging fellow-feeling, this clamorous instinct to aid? Was a hand held out to him in his hour of need? Nay, he might have known rescue and release, his future might now be fair and free, but for the device of this man who had bestirred himself to thwart the friendly mob. Was not his hope attained, his prayer? Here was a sublimated revenge. His enemy would die at his feet, and yet his hands were clean. And at this moment he was muttering, “I’ll be bound ef he hed a leetle wild-cat whiskey now ’twould save his life ez respons’ble ez ef ’twar ez legal ez the taxed corn-juice.”