"I don't know. I found him lying in the mountains almost dead from an accident a few months ago, and nursed him back to life, but he never spoke again, and he has never been able to let me know who he was." "Pardon me, but who are you?" asked Ted. "I?" said the woman, drawing herself up proudly. "I am Whipple." "What? Leader of the Whipple gang?" asked Ted, almost incredulously. "The same," said she. "I have laughed many times at the fear I inspired among you ranchmen in the valley, and the officers of the law, to say nothing of the soldiers. But that was because they had never seen me, and believed me to be a man." They all looked their astonishment, for she was an exceedingly pretty woman, and spoke in gentle tones. "But it is all over now," she continued sadly. "If those steers and ponies are yours, take them. I am going to leave the mountains, and my men are scattered and will leave also. I told them to go. And now that Silver Face is no more, there is no reason why I should stay here." "You loved him?" asked Ted, nodding toward the tent. "Yes," she answered quietly. "He was my husband. When I had nursed him back to life I sent my boys out and kidnaped a preacher. I had him brought here blindfolded, and made him marry us, then sent him back, not knowing where he had been." Ted and the boys looked their sympathy. "Can I be of any assistance to you in caring for him?" asked Stella, very sweetly. A look of terror crossed the woman's face. "No, no," she cried. "Leave me with my dead. Take what belongs to you and go." She retired into the tent, and they heard her weeping, and turned away. The boys started immediately on the back trail to the ranch, where they arrived with their cattle and ponies. That was the last of the Whipple gang, for the members of it left the country, and the outlaw Indians were gathered in by the troops and the Indian police, and imprisoned on the reservations. But on winter evenings, as he sat before the big fire in the Long Tom ranch house, his big snow camp, Ted Strong often turned over in his mind the facts about the death of Silver Face, the man of mystery. Somehow, away down in his heart, he did not believe that the man with the silver mask was dead, but that he would some day meet him again and solve the mystery that surrounded him. In the early part of December, however, the members of the Moon Valley outfit left the Long Tom Ranch for Phoenix, Arizona. CHAPTER XIII. AN UNEXPECTED GUEST. Although it was winter, the air was soft and pleasant, and at noon the sun shone with some fervor. It was Arizona, and as Ted Strong sat on Sultan and gazed across the wide valley, over which the sun's warm rays shimmered above the sand and cactus, greasewood and sage toward a low-lying ranch house in the far distance, it did not seem at all like Christmas.