"I believe you are a good man; I have seen a little of this matter, and I did what I could to avert this disaster. I cannot tell you all I know; it would be dishonorable. I want you to promise me one thing, and that is, that no matter what has happened, you will not commit a greater crime to avenge yourself of a wrong. Murder will not wipe out sin. And there is hate enough in the Territory as it is." "I am not a common butcher," said John, gloomily. "I have nothing farther to say. But there is a small log cabin not far from here, where Sherwood sometimes stays at nights." He started to go back to his quarters; then turning back, he paused as if to speak. John waited, but no word came from the trembling lips of the agitated soldier. John hurried away, too anxious to wait longer, and the colonel again slowly bent his way in the dim, midnight darkness, to the sleeping village of the white tents, and as he passed the outer guard, he murmured: "Have I done right, or have I done a cowardly thing?" The guard touched his cap, and said: "I did not understand you, sir." "No matter," answered the colonel, as he passed on more rapidly to his tent. "The girl may yet be saved, or he may be made to marry her," he muttered, as he threw up his own tent door. XXXVII. "DEAD OR DISGRACED?" John sped away between the high sagebrush and willows which skirted the stream running along west from camp. At one place he found himself on the bank and saw that the ditch ran far below in a small gully. He could hear nothing, nor could he see any signs of human habitation. He turned his steps in another direction and hurried onward in his zigzag course, straining his eyes in the fading moonlight of the evening for sight of a habitation. All at once he heard a distant or smothered cry. He stopped at once, and as he could hear nothing further, he fancied that he must have been mistaken, or that it was the screech of a far-away mountain lion. He turned again in his tracks, and by some instinct ran back to the hidden stream which flowed along down in the deep gully. That scream again! and he was sure it was a woman's voice. He flew now in the direction from which it had come. The moon was down, and he could see nothing but shadows and gloom, accustomed as he was to piercing these mountain nights with his keen, far-sighted eyes. Again and again that scream, and this time he saw, not many rods distant from him, a door flung open, for it threw a stream of light across the brush between him and the cabin. He ran on and on, jumping over the brush occasionally and panting harder as his bounds drew him nearer the source of those piercing screams. A man's curses and three successive shots rang out upon the air, mingled with screams, then a hideous laugh in a harsh voice that was still a woman's, and John could just see a flying figure bound out from the door and disappear in the depths of the shadows of the gully.