"Thank God, ye're back, Ken," she breathed. "Air ye all right--an' unharmed?" "All right an' unharmed," he responded, as he stepped to the side of the door frame and stood there a rigid and unmoving sentinel. But when Dorothy came to the threshold, she took in at once the whole picture, pregnant with significance: the glint of lamplight on the ready revolver, the relentless, tooth-marked face of her husband, and the figure of the vanquished plotter with its powerful shoulders hunched forward and its head hanging. On the mantel ticked the small tin clock, which Bas Rowlett watched from the tail of a furtive eye. As Dorothy Thornton stood in gracious slenderness against the background of the lighted door with a nimbus about her head, she was all feminine delicacy and allurement. But in that moment she stiffened to an overwhelming rush of memories which incited her to a transport of wrath for which she had no words. She saw Bas Rowlett stripped naked to the revolting bareness of his unclean soul, and she drew back with a shudder of loathing and unmoderated hate. "Why did ye dally with him, Ken?" she demanded, fiercely; "don't ye know thet whilst ye lets him live yere jest handlin' an' playin' with a rattlesnake?" "He hain't got long ter live," came the coldly confident response, "but afore he dies, he wants ter crave yore pardon, Dorothy, an' he wants ter do hit kneelin' down." Bas Rowlett shot a sidelong glance at the clock. Time was soul and essence of the matter now and minutes were the letters that spelled life and death. He listened tensely, too, and fancied that he heard a whippoorwill. There were many whippoorwills calling out there in the woods but he thought this was a double call and that between its whistlings a man might have counted five. Of that, however, he could not be sure. "I hain't got no choice, Dorothy," whined the man, whose craven soul was suffering acutely as he fenced for delay--delay at any cost. "Even ef I hed, though, I'd crave yore pardon of my own free will--but afore I does hit, thar's jest a few words I'd love ter say." Dorothy Thornton stood just inside the door. Pity, mercy, and tenderness were qualities as inherent in her as perfume in a wild flower, but there was something else in her as well--as there is death in some perfumes. If he had been actually a poisonous reptile instead of a snake soul in the body of a man Bas Rowlett could have been to her, just then, no less human. "Yes," she said, slowly, as a memory stirred the confession of her emotions, "thar's one thing I'd like ter say, too--but hit hain't in no words of my own--hit's somethin' thet was said a long spell back." From the mantel shelf she produced the old journal, and opened its yellowed pages.