All this raced through the fast-steadying brain of Martin Hawk as he watched his accuser pass him by without a look and stop irresolutely on his threshold to stare aghast at what lay beyond. It became a conviction, rather than a conjecture. Barry had set the dogs upon him! Snake! Well,--just let him get loose from these plagued hounds for half an hour or so and, by glory, they'd have something to hang him for or his name wasn't Martin Hawk. Isaac Stain did not move from the spot where she had left him, over at the edge of the clearing. His rifle was ready, his keen eyes alert. Rachel Carter entered the hut. Many minutes passed. Then she came to the door and beckoned to him. "It is Simon Braley," she said quietly. "He is dead. The girl killed him, Isaac. Will you ride over to my farm and have Allen come over here with a wagon? They're going to take the body up to town,--and the girl, too." Stain stood his rifle against the wall of the hut. "I guess I won't need this," was all he said as he turned and strode away. The man called Jasper Suggs lay in front of the tumble-down fireplace, his long body twisted grotesquely by the final spasm of pain that carried him off. The lower part of his body was covered by a filthy strip of rag carpet which some one had hastily thrown over him as Rachel Carter was on the point of entering the house. His coarse linsey shirt was soaked with blood, now dry and almost black. The harsh light from the open door struck full upon his bearded face and its staring eyes. In a corner, at the foot of a straw pallet, ordinarily screened from the rest of the cabin by a couple of suspended quilts, stood Moll Hawk, leaning against the wall, her dark sullen eyes following the men as they moved about the room. The quilts, ruthlessly torn from their fastenings on the pole, lay scattered and trampled on the floor, sinister evidence of the struggle that had taken place between woman and beast. At the other end of the room were two similar pallets, unscreened, and beside one of these lay Jasper Suggs' rawhide boots. From her place in the shadows Moll Hawk watched the other woman stoop over and gaze intently at the face of the slain man. She was a tall, well-developed girl of twenty or thereabouts. Her long, straight hair, the colour of the raven's wing, swung loose about her shoulders, an occasional strand trailing across her face, giving her a singularly witchlike appearance. Her body from the waist up was stripped almost bare; there were several long streaks of blood across her breast, where the fingers of a gory hand had slid in relaxing their grip on her shoulder. With one hand she clutched what was left of a tattered garment, vainly seeking to hide her naked breasts. The stout, coarse dress had been almost torn from her body.