Her arms went around him in desperation, and then, with one swing, he had swept her yards away, reeling before his blazing wrath. "Take your fingers from my eyes, Harrigan," he gasped in sudden agony. "I am going to kill you now--and _she_ is looking on!" The girl was afraid of him; she dared not try to hold him. She screamed wildly for help, and screamed again. And he had gone on, and wavered and crashed over upon his face, when Caleb Hunter and her father came running heavily across the lawn in answer to her shrieks. Between them they lifted him and carried him into the house. CHAPTER XXIV --AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW They carried him into the house and bore him upstairs, and laid him, quiet now and almost pulseless, upon the bed. They stood there, dumfounded, at the bedside, until Miss Sarah, re-entering the room, coolly ordered them from underfoot and sent them back downstairs. And at that their unprotesting obedience was of greater assistance than their hands could have been; but when, after one glance at the girl's stricken face, she tried the next instant to dismiss Barbara, for once Miss Sarah's will alone proved insufficient. The girl refused, point-blank, to go. "He half undressed me and put me to bed," Barbara flung back in reply to the spinster's final objection, "and if that did not shock you, surely my staying now need not!" The refusal itself brought a glint to the older woman's eyes and the phrasing thereof a flush to her cheeks, but she wasted no more words in what she knew to be useless argument. And though the girl grew sick and sicker still while Miss Sarah cut away the sodden shirt and started, with competent skill, to cleanse the wound, the latter let her remain and hold a basin of antiseptic and replenish it when necessary. Miss Sarah knew what to do; and she worked with unhurried thoroughness. They had sent for the doctor, and after ages had passed for the girl, maddeningly cool and unruffled, he arrived. But his first words, too, were an order that she leave the room, and unable to combat his professional bleakness, meekly she had to obey. Little and wholly hopeless she stole downstairs. Caleb and her father were confronting each other before the fireplace when she reached the lower floor, but the queer note of restraint in their voices meant nothing to her, until she heard her father cry out in sudden anguish. "Cal," he cried, "Cal, you don't think I was a party to this attempt at murder?" Then, at Caleb's reply, which went hurtling back at him, the girl was crouching, white and still, and clutching at the stair-rail. "Party! Attempt! Because you did not pull the trigger are you any the less guilty?" "Do you believe that I would murder the man my girl loves?" Dexter Allison moaned now. Barbara gasped at the deadly anger which crossed Caleb Hunter's face. Caleb had lifted a hand in righteous accusation.