CHAPTER XV
"ARREST THAT MAN!"
Seconds passed—tense, portentous seconds—as the two stood facing each other over the dead ashes of the little fire. Seconds in which the white drawn features of the man engraved themselves indelibly upon Chloe Elliston's brain. She noted the knotted muscles of the clenched hands and the glare of the sunken eyes. Noted, also, the cringing fear-stricken forms of the two Indians, who had awakened and lay cowering upon their blankets. And Big Lena, whose pale-blue, fishlike eyes stared first at one and then the other from out a face absolutely devoid of expression.
Suddenly a fierce, consuming anger welled into the girl's heart, and words fell from her lips in a veritable hiss of scorn: "Have you come to kill me, too?"
"By God, it would be a good thing for the North if I should kill you!"
"A good thing for MacNair, you mean!" taunted the girl. "Yes, I think it would. Well, there is nothing to hinder you. Of course, you would have to kill these, also." She indicated Big Lena and the Indians. "But what are mere lives to you?"
"They are nothing to me when the fate of my people is at stake! And at this very moment their fate—their whole future—the future of their children and their children's children—is at stake, as it has never been at stake before. Many times in my life have I faced crises: but never such a crisis as this. And always I have won, regardless of cost—but the cost only I have ever known."
His eyes glared, and he seemed a madman in his berserk rage. He drove a huge fist into his upturned palm and fairly shouted his words: "I am MacNair! And if there is a God in heaven, I will win! From this moment, it is my life or Lapierre's! Since last night's outrage there can be no truce—no quibbling—no parleying—no half-way measures! My friends are my friends, and his friends are my enemies! The war is on—and it will be a fight to the finish. A fight that may well disrupt the North!" He shook his clenched fist before the face of the girl. "I have taken the man-trail! I am MacNair! And at the end of that trail will lie a dead man—myself or Pierre Lapierre!"
"And at the beginning of the trail lie two dead men," sneered Chloe. "Those who started for the timber——"