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Warning words had passed among the few invincible ones who waited where the Healer must pass into the open, and there was absolute stillness as Laura advanced. Their work was to come–quiet and swift and sure; but not yet.

Only one face Laura saw as she led the way to the moment’s safety–Tim Denton’s; and it was as stricken as her own. She passed, then turned and looked at him again. He understood; she wanted him.

He waited till she sprang into her wagon, after the Healer had mounted his mule and ridden away with ever-quickening pace into the prairie. Then he turned to the set, fierce men beside him.

“Leave him alone,” he said–“leave him to me. I know him. You hear? Ain’t I no rights? I tell you I knew him–South. You leave him to me.”

They nodded, and he sprang into his saddle and rode away. They watched the figure of the Healer growing smaller in the dusty distance.

“Tim’ll go to her,” one said, “and perhaps they’ll let the snake get off. Hadn’t we best make sure?”

“Perhaps you’d better let him vamoose,” said Flood Rawley, anxiously. “Jansen is a law-abiding place.”

The reply was decisive. Jansen had its honor to keep. It was the home of the Pioneers–Laura Sloly was a Pioneer.

* * * * *

Tim Denton was a Pioneer, with all the comradeship which lay in the word, and he was that sort of lover who has seen one woman and can never see another–not the product of the most modern civilization. Before Laura had had Playmates he had given all he had to give; he had waited and hoped ever since; and when the ruthless gossips had said to him before Mary Jewell’s house that she was in love with the Faith Healer, nothing changed in him. For the man–for Ingles–Tim belonged to a primitive breed, and love was not in his heart. As he rode out to Sloly’s Ranch, he ground his teeth in rage. But Laura had called him to her, and–

“Well, what you say goes, Laura,” he muttered at the end of a long hour of human passion and its repression. “If he’s to go scot-free, then he’s got to go; but the boys yonder’ll drop on me if he gets away. Can’t you see what a swab he is, Laura?”

The brown eyes of the girl looked at him gently. The struggle between them was over; she had had her way–to save the preacher, impostor though he was; and now she felt, as she had never felt before in the same fashion, that this man was a man of men.

“Tim, you do not understand,” she urged. “You say he was a landsharp in the South, and that he had to leave–“

“He had to vamoose, or take tar and feathers.”

“But he had to leave. And he came here preaching and healing; and he is a hypocrite and a fraud–I know that now, my eyes are opened. He didn’t do what he said he could do, and it killed Mary Jewell–the shock; and there were other things he said he could do, and didn’t do them. Perhaps he is all bad, as you say–I don’t think so. But he did some good things, and through him I’ve felt as I’ve never felt before about God and life, and about Walt and the baby–as though I’ll see them again, sure. I’ve never felt that before. It was all as if they were lost in the hills, and no trail home, or out to where they are. Like as not God was working in him all the time, Tim; and he failed because he counted too much on the little he had, and made up for what he hadn’t by what he pretended.”

“He can pretend to himself, or God Almighty, or that lot down there”–he jerked a finger toward the town–“but to you, a girl, and a Pioneer–“