Then for the first time Bear Cat spoke to Henderson of the mission that had brought him there. "Now ye've got ter git up an' ride ter Brother Fulkerson's house," he said, with a bitter curtness. "Ye're a-goin' ter be married ter-night." "Married! To-night!" Jerry was hanging limp in the arms of his rescuer. His senses were reeling with pain and a weakness which was close to coma, but at the tone he raised his lids and met the glittering eyes that bent close, feeling a hot breath on his cheeks. This was the face of the man who had recklessly walked into a death trap to save him, but in its implacable fixity of feature there was now no vestige of friendliness. "Married!" echoed the plunger feebly. "No, buried. I'm mortally hurt, I tell you.... I'm dying. Just put me down and save yourself while ... you can." But Bear Cat Stacy was lifting him bodily to the saddle and holding him in place. "Dying?" he scornfully repeated. "I hopes ter God ye air, but afore ye dies ye're agoin' ter be married. Maybe I'm dying, too--I don't know--but I aims ter last long enough ter stand up with ye first." CHAPTER XV Kinnard Towers had spent that evening in his house at the distance of a furlong from the stockaded structure wherein the drama of his authorship was to be staged and acted. The cast, from principals to supernumeraries, having been adequately rehearsed in lines and business, his own presence on the scene would be not only unnecessary but distinctly ill advised, and like a shrinkingly modest playwright, he remained invisible. The plot was forcible in its direct simplicity. A chance disturbance would spring out of some slight pretext--and Henderson, the troublesome apostle of innovation, would fall, its accidental and single victim. When death sealed his lips the only version of the affair to reach alien ears would be that dictated by Towers himself: the narrative of a regrettable brawl in a rough saloon. Against miscarriage, the arrangements seemed airtight, and there was need that it should be so for, desirable as was the elimination of Jerry's activities, that object would not have warranted recklessly fanning into active eruption the dormant crater of Stacy animosities. However, with Lone Stacy in duress and Turner Stacy in hiding beyond the state border, the hereditary foes were left leaderless--and would hardly rise in open warfare. Moreover, Kinnard meant to insure himself against contingencies by hastening to such prominent Stacys as might be in communication with the absentees and avowing, with deep show of conviction that, of all the turbulent affairs which had ever come to focus in his tavern, nothing had so outraged him as this particular calamity. He would appear eager for active participation in hunting down and punishing the malefactors. Of course, a scape-goat might be required, perhaps more than one, but there were men who could be well enough sacrificed to such a diplomatic necessity.