She put out her hand and touched his breast. "You are; you are all bloody. Take off your coat; let me see!" "No, it's not mine; it is poor Calvin's; he was badly wounded; he leaned against me." "But I saw you standing in the pistol-fire; take it off, I say!" Her voice was almost frenziedly insistent. He removed his coat in a daze of astonishment, and she cried out, triumphantly: "See! I was right; your shirt is soaked. You are wounded!" "True enough!" he replied, looking down in surprise at a big stain on his shoulder. "I've been 'singed,' as Calvin calls it. It can't be serious, for I have not felt it." A sudden faintness seized upon Elsie as she gazed fixedly upon the tell-tale stain. A gray whiteness passed over her face. "Oh, God! suppose you had been killed!" she whispered. In that shuddering whisper was the expression of the girl's complete and final surrender, and Curtis did not question, did not speak; he took her in his arms to comfort her. "My sweetheart, you _do_ love me! I doubt no more. My poverty, your wealth, what do they matter?" She suddenly started away. "Oh, your wound! Where is the doctor? Go to him!" "The touch of your lips has healed me," he protested, but she insisted. "Go! You are bleeding!" she commanded; and so, reluctantly, lingeringly, with most unmilitary sloth, he turned away, made numb to any physical pain by the tenderness in her voice. As the young surgeon was dressing the gash, he said: "Well, Captain, things happen in the West." "Yes, the kind of things which ought not to happen anywhere. I suppose they lynched poor Cut Finger?" "No; they merely shot him and dragged him to death, as near as I can learn." Curtis clinched his fists. "Ah, the devils! Where is the body?" "Back in the corridor of the jail." Curtis pondered the effect of this news on the tribe. "It's a little difficult to eliminate violence from an inferior race when such cruelty is manifested in those we call their teachers." He sent for Ladue, who was deep in discussion of the evening's events with Crow and Two Horns, and said to him: "Do not tell the wife of Cut Finger of the death of her husband; wait till morning. What the sheriff will do with the body I do not know. To-morrow say to her, 'All is over; go with the agent.' It will do her no good to remain here. Good-night!" * * * * * It was hard to realize in the peaceful light of the following morning that the little square had been the scene of so much cruelty and riot. The townspeople came forth yawning and lax, and went about their duties mechanically. Crow Wing and Two Horns, who would camp nowhere but on the floor of Curtis's room, were awake at dawn, conversing in signs, in order not to disturb the Little Father.