At dawn McKane, who slept in the store at Cordova, heard something untoward. It was a rapping that seemed to come from the floor of the porch outside—an odd, irregular stroke, as if the hand that made it was uncertain. He rose, drew on his pants and hooking his suspenders over his shoulders as he went, opened the front door. A bay horse, gaunt and bedraggled, stood at the porch’s shoulder-high edge, and hanging half out of its saddle, held only by the right spur still caught in the hair cinch and one arm around the pommel, was the sheriff. His ghastly face was red with blood from the long wound which had split his scalp from just above the left ear across the temple to the end of the eyebrow. The trader leaped forward, jumped to the ground and caught him in his arms. “My good God, Price!” he cried, “say you ain’t dead! You ain’t bad hurt—Oh, my God!” Selwood looked at him with eyes that seemed dull as ashes. “——solved—mystery——” he said thickly. “——rustlers—raid—caught with the goods—they are——” The thick voice failed and Sheriff Price Selwood slumped down heavily on the shoulder of his erstwhile friend. It was to be long before he would finish his cryptic sentence. CHAPTER XVI THE ANCIENT MIRACLE News in the mountains travels fast, by mysterious ways, and in places where it seems impossible. Also it has marvelous powers of mutation. What may start out far down on Little Beaver Dam as an innocent prank, is liable to reach the Upper Sweet Water as a full-fledged scandal. So it was on Nameless that drowsy day in August. Nance Allison was busy about her work in the scoured kitchen, with Sonny Fair following her like a small-sized shadow. In the dim regions beyond Mrs. Allison was in bed with a “sick headache.” The balls of the carpet-rags had been sadly put away, all finished and ready for the loom, but farther away from that desired goal than ever. It seemed to Nance that that carpet was the last straw, the ridiculous small pressure that had all but snapped the thread of her control. Whenever she thought of Kate Cathrew she thought not of her Pappy, not of Bud with his sagging shoulder, not of her burned stacks and her field of growing corn, but of the bare floors of her poor home. There was a frown between her golden brows these days, a grim set to her lips, and she spent many hours on her knees beside her bed praying for guidance, for strength to keep to her narrow way. But the “stirrings” that she felt inside her in the spring had become a seething turmoil of passion, hard to hold. “I’m like the patriarchs of old,” she thought to herself, “filled with righteous wrath. If it wasn’t that I have the light of the New Testament I’m afraid I’d go forth and slay my enemies, or try to.” “What you whimpering about, Nance? Tell me, too,” said the child hugging her knees and looking adoringly up with his soft brown eyes.