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Chapter XII

The Trap Is Sprung

THE following morning when Stella, sitting up in bed, opened her mail and read Acker man's report, the last doubt of John Graham's guilt was shattered.

"I have just learned," Ackerman wrote, "that a number of men of notoriously desperate character from the foot of the mountains were in Independence on the day before the tragedy and that a man by the name of Dan Wiley, their leader, reported in person to John Graham's office."

Stella sprang from her bed and began hurriedly to dress.

"Now God give me strength for the work I'm going to do!" she cried, with strangling rage. "To think that such a man should dare to speak to me of love—should dare to clasp my hand with the stain of my father's blood yet fresh on his! I could kill him with my own hand—coward, dastard, sneak, assassin! I hate him—I hate him!"

She threw herself on her bed again in a paroxysm of uncontrollable fury. She arose at length, calm, alert, her cheeks flushed with brilliant colour,