"Ah! I supposed Red Hatchet had made no mistake. Yes, he is alive, and——"
"Yes, I am dying, Captain Carey, for your words tell me who you are, and in your disguise as Moon Eyes you heard enough to hang me. It is better that I die by the redskin's bullet than upon the gallows."
"You deserve the gallows, Bernard, most certainly, for I now know you as renegade, road agent, and a Black Hill's bandit, by your own confession in the Sioux council lodge. But I am not one to strike a man when he is down, and if you will allow me I will aid you to your horse."
"No, no, let me die here; for I cannot live half an hour at longest. Then, too, I have something to tell this child, and it will ease my conscience, and you are to hear, too, Captain Carey."
"If you mean that she is not your child, she told me that in the hostiles' camp."
"There is more to tell, for it was I who attacked the stage-coach in which she and her mother were coming west to join Brookes Woodbridge, her father. The mother was killed by a random shot, and I took the girl and sent her to my wife, for I knew Woodbridge had struck it very rich in the mines, and she would be his heiress. Well, when he was about to go east, never having known of his wife's death, I killed him——"
"You murdered my father?" gasped Jennie, in a tone of horror.
"Yes, I confess all now."
"And my mother, too—now I know why I never could love you, as my father, though so I believed you to be."
"Yes, I am guilty of the crimes of murder and robbery, and more. I was a renegade chief over the Sioux against my own people. This my wife and son never knew, for they deemed me only one who had led a desperate life in the mines. But my wife can give you, Jennie, the papers that will prove who you are, and enable you to claim your name and the fortune that is yours. Now go your way, for the shots will bring Indian scouts here, and you may both be killed. See, I am getting generous, and losing my feeling of revenge with death's grip upon me."