The voice came from one who was veiled in the fog, but they all knew it for Ward Latisan's. "Yes, Craig, you're here--here about five hours ahead of me because you had the cash to hire a special train. However, I know the short cuts for a man on horseback. I'm here, too!" His men got a dim view of him in the mists; he loomed like a statue of heroic size on the horse. Then he flung himself off and came running down the shore. He went straight to Lida and faced her manfully; but his eyes were humbly beseeching and his features worked with contrite apology. "I know now who you are, Miss Kennard. I don't mean to presume, in the case of either you or your men. But will you allow me to speak to them?" "Yes," she assented, trying to hold her poise, helped by his manner. He turned quickly from her eyes as if her gaze tortured him. "I have been a coward, men. I ran away from my job. I'm ashamed of myself. I can't square myself, but let me do my bit to-day." "I don't know what you can do--with that gang o' sneaks--after real men have had to quit," growled Vittum, unimpressed. "Maybe I'm sneak enough these days to know how to deal with 'em," confessed Latisan, bitterly. "I stayed back there just now while the fight was on, but I knew a man fight wouldn't get us anything from them." The men of the crew made no demonstration; they were awkwardly silent. The arrival of the deserter who confessed that he had been a coward did not encourage them at a time when they had failed ridiculously in their first sortie. He had ceased to be a captain who could inspire. He was one man more in a half-whipped crew, that was all. They who had been dumped over the dam dragged slimy mud from their faces and surveyed him with sullen rebuke, remembering sharply that he had run away from the girl whose cause they had taken up. The others, their faces marked with welts from blows, gazed and sniffed disparagingly. But when he spoke out to the girl and her crew they listened with increasing respect because a quick shift to manly resolution impressed them. His tone was tensely low and the noise of the tumbling water shielded his voice from eavesdroppers on the dam. "I stood back there in the fog and I heard what was said about an injunction. It's bad business, running against the courts, men. That injunction hangs over the crew of Echford Flagg. I am not one of that crew. What I may do is on my own account, and I'll stand the blame of it. All I ask is that you step aside and let me alone." "That ain't the way we want to play this game," declared Vittum. "It isn't a square game, men, and that's why you mustn't play it. It isn't a riverman fight to-day. I came north from New York on the train with Craig. He brought a gang of gunmen with him. They're hidden there in the fog. He means to go the limit, hoping to get by with it because you made the first attack. It's up to me from now on."