Lem got quickly to his feet and stood eyeing her bloodless countenance in a trance of blank incomprehension. "Tell me--tell me quick, where is McGill now?" she panted, her hat dropping from her nerveless hands and falling at her feet. "Why--Belle-Ann--I left em a layin' on his back up at th' loop." "Did you kill him?" "Naw--I didn't hev time--I wanted t' meet yo'-all--I left Buddy a guardin' em." There was pitiable, livid dread in her face now. Her pathetic mouth dropped woefully. She stood, with fingers interlocked helplessly, in the grip of a seething apprehension. Buddy, who did not understand the real cause of Belle-Ann's distress, stood with two clinched fists, and a look of awful destruction aglow in his eyes. "Didn't I say yo' oughter kilt em--didn't I tell yo'?" he cried in piping, admonishing tones. Lem had not moved a muscle, though the girl's whiteness was communicated to his mask-like visage. Now he frowned upon Buddy. "What ded yo' leave em fer?" he said. "McGill will kill you, Lem," muttered the girl, beside herself with the violence of this sudden new fear that overpowered her. "If he isn't dead now--I know that he is lurking along the trail to kill you, Lem!--Oh, it's awful!--It's so disheartening to live such lives--what can we do?--I--I----" With her hands to her face she burst into sudden tears, precluding all speech. Just as suddenly was Lem Lutts electrified with a quick determination. He grabbed Buddy's rifle. "I'll trail em down ef he's gone, Belle-Ann--I'll sho' kill em now." With a swift movement Belle-Ann clutched Lem's sleeve tenaciously to detain and dissuade him. But his eyes shone with a maniacal fire as he jerked away from her and ran back up the trail with strides that carried him far ahead of the nervous horse that had taken affright and had bolted and was now galloping up the rock-strewn path in Lem's wake. Deaf to Belle-Ann's appealing voice urging him to come back, Lem only yelled back over his shoulder: "I'll sho' kill em now!" The horse soon swerved off from the trail and plunged down toward the valley amidst the brush, with Buddy in pursuit. Belle-Ann ran now along after Lem as swiftly as her trembling, weak limbs would carry her. When Lem Lutts reached the loop he halted, struck dumb with the spectacle before his gaze. McGill lay just as he had left him more than an hour before. Apparently he had not moved a finger. CHAPTER XXXV THE DOWNFALL OF SAP McGILL Thinking McGill dead, Lem made one step forward and stopped, attracted by a strange, quivering movement; then he beheld the rattlesnake coiled up on Sap's breast. Then a sudden revelation dawned upon Lem Lutts. He felt instinctively that Sap was not dead, although he could not have been whiter and more inert had he been so.