"She done gone up stairs, suh. Lan' sakes, Mistah Gwynne, what fo' yo' do dat to Mistah Barry? He her beau. Didn't yo'all know dat? Ah close mah eyes when she tooken dat gun out dar. Sez Ah, she gwine to shoot Mistah Gwynne--" "Tell her I'm here, Hattie. I must see her at once. It's all right. She isn't angry with me." The girl hesitated. "She look mighty white an' sick, suh. She never say a word. Jes' go right up stairs, she did. Ah follers, 'ca'se Ah was skeert about de way she look. She shutten de do' an' drop de bolt,--yas, suh, dat's what she do. Lordy, Ah wonder why her ma don't come home an' look after--" "See here," he broke in, "don't disturb her now. I will come back in a little while. If she wants me for anything you will find me out at the gate. Do you understand? Don't fail to call me. I am going out there to wait for her mother." It suddenly had occurred to him that he ought to intercept Rachel Carter before she reached the house, not only to prepare her for the shock that awaited her but to devise between them some means of undoing the harm that already had been done. They would have to stand together in denouncing Barry, they would have to swear to Viola that the story was false. He realized what this would mean to him: an almost profane espousal of his enemy's cause, involving not only the betrayal of his own conscience, but the deliberate repudiation of the debt he owed his mother and her people. He would have to go before Viola and proclaim the innocence of the woman who had robbed and murdered his own mother. The unthinkable, the unbelievable confronted him. A cold sweat broke out all over him as he stood down by the gate, torn between hatred for one woman and love for another: Rachel and Minda Carter. He could not spare one without sparing the other; lying to one of them meant lying for the other. But there was no alternative. The memory of the look in Viola's eyes as she shrank away from Lapelle, the thought of the cruel shock she must have suffered, the picture of her as she came down the path to kill--no, there could be no alternative! And so, as he leaned rigidly against the gate, sick at heart but clear of head, waiting for Rachel Carter, he came to think that, after all, a duel with Barry Lapelle might prove to be the easiest and noblest way out of his difficulties. CHAPTER XXI THE AFFAIR AT HAWK'S CABIN It wanted half an hour of daybreak when a slow-riding, silent group of men came to a halt and dismounted in the narrow lane some distance from the ramshackle abode of Martin Hawk, squatting unseen among the trees that lined the steep bank of the Wabash. A three hours' ride through dark, muddy roads lay behind them. There were a dozen men in all,--and one woman, at whose side rode the hunter, Stain. They had stopped at the latter's cabin on the way down, and she had conversed apart with him through a window. Then they rode off, leaving him to follow.