"Yes, you said so; but I did not quite understand—he planned then—why?"
"Because he had heard of your beauty and that you were rich. Were these not reasons enough? But, after he had mistaken you for Rene, the only possible way in which he could hope to gain you was by force. Jack Rale suggested that to him and how it could be done. The other man was a friend of Rale's, a renegade preacher named Gaskins; he is dead."
"Dead! Killed?"
"Yes; we brought you away after a fight with those fellows. We left Rale bound and Kirby unconscious."
"Unconscious, hurt—but not dead?"
"He had a bad gash in his skull, but was alive."
Kennedy, puffing happily upon a pipe, came loitering about the corner of the hut and approached us. Eloise staggered to her feet, shrinking back against the wall of the shack, her eyes on his face.
"That man here!" she cried in terror. "That man? Why, he was at Beaucaire! He is the one to whom I claimed to be Rene."