"That's enough," cried Britton, vehemently. "Can't you see he has fainted?"
A team of horses pulled up with a jangle of bells in the trail. Some woman's gauntlet, flying through the frosty air, struck Rex a stinging blow upon the cheek.
"Ho! ho!" laughed a coarse fellow at his elbow, "so the Rose of the Yukon's down on you, eh? Or maybe it's a love-tap."
Rex looked between the disordered ranks of roughly-clad miners straight into the flaming eyes of Maud Morris, where she sat behind Simpson's spanking grays, in Simpson's luxuriously robed sleigh, beside the fur-coated, well-groomed Simpson himself.
Her furious glance transfixed Britton and then darted off, tangent-like, to the clamorous group on his left, where three miners had revived Morris with a stimulant and assisted him to an erect posture.
The bare back of Chris Morris was a raw, red patch, and he quivered convulsively as the sifting hill-wind bit into the bleeding stripes, while his custodians replaced shirts, vest, and parka upon his body.
Maud Morris's second glove followed the first, striking Britton rudely in the mouth.
"You beast!" she screamed impotently. "This is your doing, I hear!"
Rex ground the gauntlets into the beaten, tobacco-stained snow under his feet.
"Be thankful that Morris lives," was his heated answer. "They swore he must swing and fought against the commuting of his sentence. It was a tight pinch, but Laurance and I managed to pull it off at last."