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"You go see," she answered in a low voice, pointing to the open door. As I entered the commodious living room Doloria looked up, but did not smile. She was reclining on a chaise-longue, beneath a shaded lamp whose rays still blended with the light of a dying afterglow.

We were being showered with lead by now, and between the wasplike things speeding overhead and their "sput-sput" as they hit the logs, I dared expose no more than my eyes and forehead while emptying rifle after rifle. In the fleeting movement of handing one down and taking the other I saw Doloria sitting near my feet, with several opened boxes of cartridges on the ground beside her.

Locking the door, we passed back to the living room and thence to the landing where, at our direction, the sailor signaled Gates to bring up his waiting party. As Doloria once more stepped upon the island I saw her eyes grow moist with tears.

My nerves were steady with a purpose deep-set in me, for I was about to shoot for the greatest trophy of my life, so when the line had advanced a third of the way I took careful aim, and fired. A second passed; then my target disappeared. "Is he hit or hiding?" Doloria asked excitedly, adding with a little gasp: "He's hit, for some are going to him see?"

You don't know the power that man, Dragot, has! Will you run off with me to-night?" For I could not dismiss the obsession that Monsieur would prevail. "He came especially armed with government orders to find you and take you back. And I'm only afraid your heart's too straight to refuse him, even if you could, when he puts it up to your conscience! Oh, Doloria please don't cry!"

Late that evening we buried Efaw Kotee under the mangroves, and did not tell Doloria. No one knows, who has never seen it, the desolation of laying a shrouded figure in a mangrove-covered oyster bar at twilight, where water follows each slushy lift of the spade! I feared for her to witness it, and therefore, Tommy reading the service, the old chief was buried without a woman's sympathy.

Doloria must have understood this, and for the first time she began to fire, yet at nearly a thousand yards, when one's target not only moves but looks small and black upon a blackened background, and is made further elusive by a haze of smoke, only luck can hit it. Still we played that luck to the last card, until one by one the men made safe and disappeared.

He was not on the crest of popularity, anyway. Previously, in order to give Doloria more freedom, Tommy and I decided to sleep on deck and use Gates's quarters for a dressing room. But when this proposition was also opened to the professor he flatly refused to join with us.

I could not reasonably have expected to register a hit by this, but it kept them in check, and that was our chief concern. From the beginning I realized that if they got near enough to rush us the night would close over a very silent little fort. Suddenly Doloria gave a cry that froze my blood, for I thought it meant an attack from the rear. "Quick quick! Your matches!

It's Doloria you see, my life has been sad!" "One wouldn't say so to look at you now. And I think Doloria's a thousand times prettier than Sylvia! Doloria! Just Doloria like that?" For I wanted an excuse to keep on saying it. "I I suppose so," she hesitated. "Of course, it's always had Graham after it, but what did your Monsieur Dragot say my last name was?" "He didn't say." "Then I haven't any."