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 him, grinning at her insolently through the shadows, lurked the squat, shifty-eyed inn servant, Sturgins.

Instinctively she jerked at her horse's bridle, dug her sturdy little heels into his sides. It was too late! In a trice she had been torn from her saddle, smothered in some sort of a garment with her hands clasped to her sides, and borne swiftly away in strong arms—whither, she knew not! She only knew that the evil-smelling cloth was strangling her, so that when she cried out, the sound beat impotently upon its folds, while her struggles were as an infant's against the cruel strength of those arms!

It seemed to her that she must have been carried for miles before the terrifying cloth over her head was removed and she was set down roughly upon her feet. But as she stood gasping and blinking she reahzed in amazement that she had been carried only as far as some fir trees beside the river edge and there concealed so that no one approaching by the path or by water could see her. She looked up to find the tall, hard-faced stranger beside her and heard Sturgins carefully leading her horse to a similar hiding place.

"Now, Jaffray," began Sturgins, when he joined them, "do ye not think this bodes trouble from the ship? 'Tis well we arrived!"

"Hush ye!" growled Jaffray, fiercely. "Babbling fool!"

In the pregnant silence which followed, Mehitable stared up at her captor curiously and, it must be admitted, with a little shiver of disagreeable surprise. So this was the man who had so cruelly kidnapped