Saul Chadron had built himself into that house. It was a solid and assertive thing of rude importance where it stood in the great plain, the river lying flat before it in its low banks like a gray thread through the summer green. There was a bold front to the house, and a turret with windows, standing like a lighthouse above the sea of meadows in which his thousand-numbered cattle fed.

As white as a dove it sat there among the cottonwoods at the riverside. A stream of water led into its gardens to gladden them and give them life. Years ago, when Chadron’s importance was beginning to feel itself strong upon its legs, and when Nola was a little thing with light curls blowing about her blue eyes, the house had grown up under the wand of riches in that barren place.

After the lordly manner of the cattle “barons,” as they were called in the Northwest, Chadron set his bounds by mountains and rivers. Twenty-five hundred square miles, roughly measured, lay within his lines, the Alamito Ranch he called it—the Little Cottonwood. He had no more title to that great sweep of land than the next man who might come along, and he paid no rental fee to nation nor state for grazing his herds upon it. But the cattle barons had so apportioned the land between themselves, and Saul Chadron, and each member of the Drovers’ Association, had the power of their mighty organization to uphold his hand. That power was incontestable in the Northwest in its day; there was no higher law.

This Alan Macdonald was an unaccountable man, a man of education, it was said, which made him doubly dangerous in Saul Chadron’s eyes. Saul himself had come up from the saddle, and he was not strong on letters, but he had seen the power of learning in lawyers’ offices, and he respected it, and handled it warily, like a loaded gun.

The problem of a fighting “nester” was a new one to the cattlemen of that country. For twenty years they had kept that state under the dominion of the steer, and held its rich agricultural and mineral lands undeveloped. The herbage there, curing in the dry suns of summer as it stood on the upland plains, provided winter forage for their herds. There was no need for man to put his hand to the soil and debase himself to a peasant’s level when he might live in a king’s estate by roaming his herds over the untamed land.

Homesteaders who did not know the conditions drifted there on the westward-mounting wave, only to be hustled rudely away, or to pay the penalty of refusal with their lives. Reasons were not given, rights were not pleaded by the lords of many herds. They had the might to work their will; that was enough.

Not alone that, but other homesteaders had come and settled near him across the river on two other big ranches which cornered there against Chadron’s own. These nesters drew courage from Macdonald’s example, and cunning from his counsel, and stood against the warnings, persecutions, and attempts at forceful dislodgment. The law of might did not seem to apply to them, and there was no other source equal to the dignity of the Drovers’ Association—at least none to which it cared to carry its grievances and air them.

So they cut Alan Macdonald’s fences, and other homesteaders’ fences, in the night and drove a thousand or two cattle across his fields, trampling the growing grain and forage into the earth; they persecuted him in a score of harassing, quick, and hidden blows. But this homesteader was not to be driven away by ordinary means. Nature seemed to lend a hand to him, he made crops in spite of the cattlemen, and was prospering. He had taken root and appeared determined to remain, and the others were taking deep root with him, and the free, wide range was coming under the menace of the fence and the lowly plow.

That was the condition of things in those fair autumn days when Prances Landcraft returned to the post. The Drovers’ Association, and especially the president of it, was being defied in that section, where probably a hundred homesteaders had settled with their families of long-backed sons and daughters. They were but a speck on the land yet, as Chadron had told the smoky stranger when he had engaged him to try his hand at throwing the “holy scare.” But they spread far over the upland plain, having sought the most favored spots, and they were a blight and a pest in the eyes of the cattlemen.

Nola had flitted back to the ranchhouse, carrying Frances with her to bring down the curtain on her summer’s festivities there in one last burst of joy. The event was to be a masquerade, and everybody from the post was coming, together with the few from Meander who had polish enough to float them, like new needles in a glass of water, through frontier society’s depths. Some were coming from Cheyenne, also, and the big house was dressed for them, even to the bank of palms to conceal the musicians, in the polite way that society has of standing something in front of what it cannot well dispense with, yet of which it appears to be ashamed.

Mrs. Chadron was in the living-room, with its big fireplace and homely things, when they came chattering out of the enchanted place. She was sitting by the window which gave her a view of the dim gray road where it came over the grassy swells from Meander and the world, knitting a large blue sock.

Mrs. Chadron was a cow-woman of the unimproved school. She was a heavy feeder on solids, and she liked plenty of chili peppers in them, which combination gave her a waist and a ruddiness of face like a brewer. But she was a good woman in her fashion, which was narrow, and intolerant of all things which did not wear hoofs and horns, or live and grow mighty from the proceeds of them. She never had expanded mentally to fit the large place that Saul had made for her in the world of cattle, although her struggle had been both painful and sincere.

“Well, I declare! if here don’t come Banjo Gibson,” said she, her hand on the curtain, her red face near the pane like a beacon to welcome the coming guest. There was pleasure in her voice, and anticipation. The blue sock slid from her lap to the floor, forgotten.

“Yes, it’s Banjo,” said Nola. “I wonder where he’s been all summer? I haven’t seen him in an age.”

“Who is he?” Frances inquired, looking out at the approaching figure,

“The troubadour of the North Platte, I call him,” laughed Nola; “the queerest little traveling musician in a thousand miles. He belongs back in the days of romance, when men like him went playing from castle to court—the last one of his kind.”

Frances watched him with new interest as he drew up to the big gate, which was arranged with weights and levers so that a horseman could open and close it without leaving the saddle. The troubadour rode a mustang the color of a dry chili pepper, but with none of its spirit. It came in with drooping head, the reins lying untouched on its neck, its mane and forelock platted and adorned fantastically with vari-colored ribbons. Rosettes were on the bridle, a fringe of leather thongs along the reins.

“He’ll know where to put his horse,” said Mrs. Chadron, getting up with a new interest in life, “and I’ll just go and have Maggie stir him up a bite to eat and warm the coffee. He’s always hungry when he comes anywhere, poor little man!”

“Can he play that battery of instruments?” Prances asked.

“Wait till you hear him,” nodded Nola, a laugh in her merry eyes.

Then they fell to talking of the coming night, and of the trivial things which are so much to youth, and to watching along the road toward Meander for the expected guests from Cheyenne, who were to come up on the afternoon train.

His voice was full and rich, a deep, soft note in it like a rare instrument in tune. His small feet were shod in the shiningest of shoes, which he had given a furbishing in the barn, and a flowing cravat tied in a large bow adorned his low collar. There were stripes in the musician’s shirt like a Persian tent, but it was as clean and unwrinkled as if he had that moment put it on.

Banjo Gibson—if he had any other christened name, it was unknown to men—was an original. As Nola had said, he belonged back a few hundred years, when musical proficiency was not so common as now. The profession was not crowded in that country, happily, and Banjo traveled from ranch to ranch carrying cheer and entertainment with him as he passed.

He had been doing that for years, having worked his way westward from Nebraska with the big cattle ranches, and his art was his living. Banjo’s arrival at a ranch usually resulted in a dance, for which he supplied the music, and received such compensation as the generosity of the host might fix. Banjo never quarreled over such matters. All he needed was enough to buy cigarettes and shirts.

Banjo seldom played in company with any other musician, owing to certain limitations, which he raised to distinguishing virtues. He played by “air,” as he said, despising the unproficiency of all such as had need of looking on a book while they fiddled. Knowing nothing of transposition, he was obliged to tune his banjo—on those rare occasions when he stooped to play “second” at a dance—in the key of each fresh tune. This was hard on the strings, as well as on the patience of the player, and Banjo liked best to go it single-handed and alone.

When he heard that musicians were coming from Cheyenne—a day’s journey by train—to play for Nola’s ball, his face told that he was hurt, but his respect of hospitality curbed his words. He knew that there was one appreciative ear in the mansion by the river that no amount of “dago fiddlin’” ever would charm and satisfy like his own voice with the banjo, or his little brown fiddle when it gave out the old foot-warming tunes. Mrs. Chadron was his champion in all company, and his friend in all places.

“Well, sakes alive! Banjo, I’m as tickled to see you as if you was one of my own folks,” she declared, her face as warm as if she had just gorged on the hottest of hot dishes which her Mexican cook, Maggie, could devise.

“I’m glad to be able to make it around ag’in, thank you, mom,” Banjo assured her, sentiment and soul behind the simple words. “I always carry a warm place in my heart for Alamito wherever I may stray.”

Nola frisked around and took the banjo from its green cover, talking all the time, pushing and placing chairs, and settling Banjo in a comfortable place. Then she armed him with the instrument, making quite a ceremony of it, and asked him to play.

Banjo twanged the instrument into tune, hooked the toe of his left foot behind the forward leg of his chair, and struck up a song which he judged would please the young ladies. Of Mrs. Chadron he was sure; she had laughed over it a hundred times. It was about an adventure which the bard had shared with his gal in a place designated in Banjo’s uncertain vocabulary as “the big cook-quari-um.” It began:

The chorus of it ran:

From that one Banjo passed to “The Cowboy’s Lament,” and from tragedy to love. There could be nothing more moving—if not in one direction, then in another—than the sentimental expression of Banjo’s little sandy face as he sang:

Sundown was rosy behind the distant mountains, a sea of purple shadows laved their nearer feet, when Banjo got out his fiddle at Mrs. Chadron’s request and sang her “favorite” along with the moving tones of that instrument.

As he sang, Nola slipped from the room. He was finishing when she sped by the window and came sparkling into the room with the announcement that the guests from far Cheyenne were coming. Frances was up in excitement; Mrs. Chadron searched the floor for her unfinished sock.

“What was that flashed a-past the winder like a streak a minute ago?” Banjo inquired.

“Flashed by the window?” Nola repeated, puzzled.

Frances laughed, the two girls stopping in the door, merriment gleaming from their young faces like rays from iridescent gems.

“Why, that was Nola,” Frances told him, curious to learn what the sentimental eyes of the little musician foretold.

“I thought it was a star from the sky,” said Banjo, sighing softly, like a falling leaf.

“I knew there was something behind those eyes,” said Frances.

“No telling how long he’s been saving it for a chance to work it off on somebody,” Nola said. “He got it out of a book—the Mexicans all have them, full of brindies, what we call toasts, and silly soft compliments like that.”

“I’ve seen them, little red books that they give for premiums with the Mexican papers down in Texas,” Frances nodded, “but Banjo didn’t get that out of a book—it was spontaneous.”

“I must write it down, and compare it with the next time he gets it off.”

“Give him credit for the way he delivered it, no matter where he got it,” Frances laughed. “Many a more sophisticated man than your desert troubadour would have broken his neck over that. He’s in love with you, Nola—didn’t you hear him sigh?”

“Oh, he has been ever since I was old enough to take notice of it,” returned Nola, lightly.

“Oh, my luv’s like a falling star,” paraphrased Frances.

“Not much!” Nola denied, more than half serious. “Venus is ascendant; you keep your eye on her and see.”

There was no mistaking the assiduity with which Major King waited upon Nola Chadron that night at the ball, any more than there was a chance for doubt of that lively little lady’s identity. He sought her at the first, and hung by her side through many dances, and promenaded her in the garden walks where Japanese lanterns glimmered dimly in the soft September night, with all the close attention of a farrier cooling a valuable horse.

Perhaps it was punishment—or meant to be—for the insubordination of Frances Landcraft in speaking to the outlawed Alan Macdonald on last beef day. If so, it was systematically and faithfully administered.

Nola was dressed like a cowgirl. Not that there were any cowgirls in that part of the country, or anywhere else, who dressed that way, except at the Pioneer Week celebration at Cheyenne, and in the romantic dramas of the West. But she was so attired, perhaps for the advantage the short skirt gave her handsome ankles—and something in silk stockings which approached them in tapering grace.

Frances Landcraft appeared at the ball as an Arabian lady, meaning in her own interpretation of the masking to stand as a representation of the “Thou,” who is endearingly and importantly capitalized in the verses of the ancient singer made famous by Irish-English Fitzgerald. Her disguise was sufficient, only that her hair was so richly assertive. There was not any like it in the cattle country; very little like it anywhere. It was a telltale, precious possession, and Major King never could have made good a plea of hidden identity against it in this world.

Frances had consolation enough for his alienation and absence from her side if numbers could compensate for the withdrawal of the fealty of one. She distributed her favors with such judicial fairness that the tongue of gossip could not find a breach. At least until the tall Scotsman appeared, with his defiant red hair and a feather in his bonnet, his plaid fastened across his shoulder with a golden clasp.

Nobody knew when he arrived, or whence. He spoke to none as he walked in grave stateliness among the merry groups, acknowledging bold challenges and gay banterings only with a bow. The ladies from the post had their guesses as to who he might be, and laid cunning little traps to provoke him into betrayal through his voice. As cunningly he evaded

them, with unsmiling courtesy, his steady gray eyes only seeming to laugh at them behind his green mask.

Frances had finished a dance with a Robin Hood—the slender one in billiard-cloth green—there being no fewer than four of them, variously rounded, diversely clad, when the Scot approached her where she stood with her gallant near the musicians’ brake of palms.

said the tall Highlandman, bending over her shoulder, his words low in her ear. “Only I could be happy without the wine,” he added, as she faced him in quick surprise.

“Your penetration deserves a reward—you are the first to guess it,” said she.

“Three dances, no less,” said he, like a usurer demanding his toll.

He offered his arm, and straightway bore her off from the astonished Robin Hood, who stood staring after them, believing, perhaps, that he was the victim of some prearranged plan.

The spirit of his free ancestors seemed to be in the lithe, tall Highlander’s feet. There was no dancer equal to him in that room. A thistle on the wind was not lighter, nor a wheeling swallow more graceful in its flight.

“Who is that dancing with Frances Landcraft?” she breathed in the major’s ear.

“I didn’t know it was Miss Landcraft,” he replied, although he knew it very well, and resolved to find out who the Scotsman was, speedily and completely.

“My enchanted hour will soon pass,” said the Scot, when that dance was done, “and I have been looking the world over for you.”

“Dancing all the way?” she asked him lightly.

“Far from it,” he answered, his voice still muffled and low.

They were standing withdrawn a little from the press in the room after their second dance, when Major King came by. The major was a cavalier in drooping hat, with white satin cape, and sword by his side, and well enough known to all his friends in spite of the little spat of mustache and beard. As the major passed he jostled the Scot with his shoulder with a rudeness openly intentional.

The major turned, and spoke an apology. Frances felt the Highlander’s muscles swell suddenly where her hand lay on his arm, but whatever had sprung into his mind he repressed, and acknowledged the major’s apology with a lofty nod.

The music for another dance was beginning, and couples were whirling out upon the floor.

“I don’t care to dance again just now, delightfully as you carry a clumsy one like me through—”

“A self-disparagement, even, can’t stand unchallenged,” he interrupted.

“Mr. Macdonald,” she whispered, “your wig is awry.”

They were near the door opening to the illumined garden, with its late roses, now at their best, and hydrangea clumps plumed in foggy bloom. They stepped out of the swirl of the dance like particles thrown from a wheel, not missed that moment even by those interested in keeping them in sight.

“You knew me!” said he, triumphantly glad, as they entered the garden’s comparative gloom.

“At the first word,” said she.

“I came here in the hope that you would know me, and you alone—I came with my heart full of that hope, and you knew me at the first word!”

There was not so much marvel as satisfaction, even pride for her penetration, in it.

“Somebody else may have recognized you, too—that man who brushed against you—”

“He’s one of your officers.”

“I know—Major King. Do you know him?”

“No, and he doesn’t know me. He can have no interest in me at all.”

“Very well; set your beautiful red wig straight and then tell me why you wanted to come here among your enemies. It seems to me a hardy challenge, a most unnecessary risk.”

“No risk is unnecessary that brings me to you,” he said, his voice trembling in earnestness. “I dared to come because I hoped to meet you on equal ground.”

“You’re a bold man—in more ways than one.” She shook her head as in rebuke of his temerity.

“But you don’t believe I’m a thief,” said he, conclusively.

“No; I have made public denial of it.” She laughed lightly, but a little nervously, an uneasiness over her that she could not define.

“An angel has risen to plead for Alan Macdonald, then!”

“Why should you need anybody to plead for you if there’s no truth in their charges? What is a man like you doing in this wild place, wasting his life in a land where he isn’t wanted?”

They had turned into a path that branched beyond the lanterns. The white gravel from the river bars with which it was paved glimmered among the shadowy shrubs. Macdonald unclasped his plaid from his shoulders and transferred it to hers. She drew it round her, wrapping her arms in it like a squaw, for the wind was coming chill from the mountains now.

“What else?” she asked, after a little, seeing that he walked slowly, his head up, his eyes far away on the purple distances of the night, as if he read a dream.

“I settled in this valley quite innocently, as others have done, before and after me, not knowing conditions. You’ve heard it said that I’m a rustler—”

“King of the rustlers,” she corrected.

They turned and walked back toward the house.

“I don’t see why you should trouble about it; this plainly isn’t your place,” she said.

“First, I refused to be driven out by Chadron and the rest because the thing got on my mettle. I knew that I was right, and that they were simply stealing the public domain. Then, as I hung on, it became apparent that there was a man’s work cut out for somebody up here. I’ve taken the ready-made job.”

“Tell me about it.”

“There’s a monstrous injustice being practiced, systematically and cruelly, against thousands of homeless people who come to this country in innocent hope every year. They come here believing it’s the great big open-handed West they’ve heard so much about, carrying everything with them that they own. They cut the strings that hold them to the things they know when they face this way, and when they try to settle on the land that is their inheritance, this copper-bottomed combination of stockmen drives them out. If they don’t go, they shoot them. You’ve heard of it.”

“Not just that way,” said she, thoughtfully.

“But there must be millions behind the cattlemen, Mr. Macdonald.”

“There are. It seems just about hopeless that a handful of ragged homesteaders ever can make a stand against them. But they’re usurping the public domain, and they’ll overreach themselves one of these days. Chadron has title to this homestead, but that’s every inch of land that he’s got a legal right over. In spite of that, he lays the claim of ownership to the land fifteen miles north of here, where I’ve nested. He’s been telling me for more than two years that I must clear out.”

“You could give it up, and go back to your work among men, where it would count,” she said.

“There are things here that count. I couldn’t put a state on the map—an industrial and progressive one, I mean—back home in Washington, or sitting with my feet on the desk in some sleepy consulate. And I’m going to put this state on the map where it belongs. That’s the job that’s cut out for me here, Miss Landcraft.”

“Even then, I don’t see what a ranch away off up here from anywhere ever will be worth to you, especially when the post is abandoned. You know the department is going to give it up?”

“And then you—” he began in consternation, checking himself to add, slowly, “no, I didn’t know that.”

“Perhaps in a year.”

“It can’t make much difference in the value of land up this valley, though,” he mused. “When the railroad comes on through—and that will be as soon as we break the strangle hold of Chadron and men like him—this country will develop overnight. There’s petroleum under the land up where I am, lying shallow, too. That will be worth something then.”

The music of an old-style dance was being played. Now the piping cowboy voice of some range cavalier rose, calling the figures. The two in the garden path turned with one accord and faced away from the bright windows again.

“They’ll be unmasking at midnight?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid I can’t go in again, then. The hour of my enchantment is nearly at its end.”

“You shouldn’t have come,” she chided, yet not in severity, rather in subdued admiration for his reckless bravery. “Suppose they—”

“Mac! O Mac!” called a cautious, low voice from a hydrangea bush close at hand.

“Who’s there?” demanded Macdonald, springing forward.

“They’re onto you, Mac,” answered the voice from the shrub, “they’re goin’ to do you hurt. They’re lookin’ for you now!”

There was a little rustling in the leaves as the unseen friend moved away. The voice was the voice of Banjo Gibson, but not even the shadow of the messenger had been seen.

“You should have gone before—hurry!” she whispered in alarm.

“Never mind. It was a risk, and I took it, and I’d take it again tomorrow. It gave me these minutes with you, it was worth—”

“You must go! Where’s your horse?”

“Down by the river in the willows. I can get to him, all right.”

“They may come any minute, they—”

“No, they’re dancing yet. I expected they’d find me out; they know me too well. I’ll get a start of them, before they even know I’m gone.”

“They may be waiting farther on—why don’t you go—go! There—listen!

“They’re saddling,” he whispered, as low sounds of haste came from the barnyard corral.

“Go—quick!” she urged, flinging his plaid across his arm.

“I’m going—in one moment more. Miss Landcraft, I’ll ride away from you tonight perhaps never to see you again, and if I speak impetuously before I leave you, forgive me before you hear the words—they’ll not hurt you—I don’t believe they’ll shame you.”

“Don’t say anything more, Mr. Macdonald—even this delay may cost your life!”

“They’ll kill me if they can; they’ve tried it more than once. I never know when I ride away whether I’ll ever return. It isn’t a new experience, just a little graver than usual—only that. I came here tonight because I—I came to—in the hope—” he stammered, putting out his hands as if supplicating her to understand, his plaid falling to the ground.

“Go!” she whispered, her hand on his arm in appeal, standing near him, dangerously near.

“I’ve got a right to love you—I’ve got a right!” he said, the torrent of his passion leaping all curbing obstacles of delicacy, confusion, fear. He flung the words from him in wild vehemence, as if they eased a pang.

“No—no, you have no right! you—”

He spoke rapidly, bending so near that his breath moved the hair on her temple. She stood with arms half lifted, her hands clenched, her breath laboring in her bosom. She did not know that love—she had not known that love—could spring up that way, and rage like a flame before a wind.

“If you’re pledged to another man, then I’ll defy him, man to man—I do defy him, I challenge him!”

As he spoke he stooped, suddenly, like a wind-bent flame, clasped her, kissed her, held her enfolded in his arms one moment against his breast. He released her then, and stepped back, standing tall and silent, as if he waited for her blast of scorn. It did not come. She was standing with hands pressed to her face, as if to cover some shame or sorrow, or ease the throbbing of a soul-deep pain.

The sound of men and horses came from the corral. He stood, waiting for judgment.

“Go now,” she said, in a sad, small voice.

“Give me a token to carry away, to tell me I have not broken my golden hope,” he said.

“No, I’ll give you nothing!” she declared, with the sharpness of one wronged, and helpless of redress. “You have taken too much—you have taken—”

“What?” he asked, as if he exulted in what he heard, his blood singing in his ears.

“Oh, go—go!” she moaned, stripping off one long white glove and throwing it to him.

He caught it, and pressed it to his lips; then snatching off his bonnet, hid it there, and bent among the shrubbery and was gone, as swiftly and silently as a wolf. Frances flew to the house and up the stairs to her room. There she threw up the window and sat panting in it, straining, listening, for sounds from the river road.

From below the voices of the revelers came, and the laughter over the secrets half-guessed before masks were snatched away around the banquet table. There was a dash of galloping hoofs from the corral, the clatter of the closing gate. The sound grew dimmer, was lost, in the sand of the hoof-cut trail.

After a little, a shot! two! a silence; three! and one as if in reply. Frances slipped to her knees beside the open window, a sob as bitter as the pang of death rising from her breast. She prayed that Alan Macdonald might ride fast, and that the vindictive hands of his enemies might be unsteady that night by the gray riverside.

“Don’t you think we’d better drop it now, Frances, and be good?”

Major King reined his horse near hers as he spoke, and laid his hand on the pommel of her saddle as if he expected to meet other fingers there.

“You puzzle me, Major King,” she returned, not willing to understand.

They were bringing up the rear of the tired procession which was returning to the post from the ball. Already the east was quickening. The stars near the horizon were growing pale; the morning wind was moving, with a warmth in it from the low places, like a tide toward the mountains.

“Oh, I mean this play acting of estrangement,” said he, impatiently. “Let’s forget it—it doesn’t carry naturally with either you or me.”

“Why, Major King!” Her voice was lively with mild surprise; she was looking at him as if for verification of his words. Then, slowly: “I hadn’t thought of any estrangement, I hadn’t intended to bring you to task for one flirtatious night. Be sure, sir, if it has given you pleasure, it has brought me no pain.”

“I began it, Major King? It’s too early in the morning for a joke!”

“You were wilful and contrary; you would speak to the fellow that day.”

“Oh!” deprecatingly.

“Never mind it, though. Wilfulness doesn’t become either of us, Frances. I’ve tried my turn at it tonight, and it has left me cold.”

“Poor man!” said she, in low voice, like a sigh. Perhaps it was not all for Major King; perhaps not all assumed.

“Let’s not quarrel, Frances.”

“Not now, I’m too tired for a real good one. Leave it for tomorrow.”

He rode on in silence, not sure, maybe, how much of it she meant. Covertly she looked at him now and then, thinking better of him for his ingenuous confession of failure to warm himself at little Nola Chadron’s heart-flame. She extended her hand.

“Forgive me, Major King,” she said, very softly, not far removed, indeed, from tenderness.

For a little while Major King left his horse to keep the road its own way, his cavalry hands quite regardless of manuals, regulations, and military airs. Both of them were enfolding her one. He might have held it until they reached the post, but that she drew it away.

Her cheeks grew hot, her heart leaped again, at the recollection of that strong man’s wild, bold words, his defiant kiss upon her lips. She had yielded them in the recklessness of that moment, in the force of his all-carrying demand, when she might have denied them, or sped away from him, as innocence is believed to know from instinct when to fly from a destructive lure.

Closing her eyes against the gray-creeping morning, she saw him again, standing that moment with her glove to his lips; saw him bend and speed away, the cunning of his hunted ancestors in his swift feet and self-eliminating form. A wild fear struck her, a cold dread fell like ashes into her heart, as she wondered how well he had ridden that night, and how far.

Back again in her home at the post, the day awake around her, reveille sounding in the barracks, she turned the key in her door as if to shut the secret in with her, and bent beneath the strain of her long suspense. She no longer tried to conceal, or to deny to her own heart, the love she bore that man, which had come so suddenly, and so fiercely sweet.

No longer past than the evening before her heart had ached with jealous pain over the little triumph that Nola Chadron had thought she was making of Major King. Now Nola might have Major King, and all the world beside that her little head might covet. There was no reservation in the surrender that she made of him in her conscience, no regret.

She reproached herself for it in one breath, and glowed with a strange new gladness the next, clasping the great secret fearfully in her breast, in the world-old delusion that she had come into possession of a treasure uniquely and singularly her own. One thing she understood plainly now; she never had loved Major King. What a revolution it was to overturn a life’s plans thus in a single night! thought she.

How easily we are astounded by the eruptions in our own affairs, and how disciplined in the end to find that the foundations of the world have withstood the shock!

There was no way of knowing what the result of that race had been. If he had escaped, Frances believed that he would let her know in some way; if he had fallen, she knew that the news of his death, important as it would be to Chadron, would fly as if it had wings. There was nothing to do but wait, and in any event hide away that warm sweet thing that had unfolded in beautiful florescence in her soul.

She told herself that he must have escaped, or the pursuers would have returned long before the party from the post left the Chadron house. He had led them a long ride in his daring way, and doubtless was laughing at them now in his own house, among his friends. She wondered what his surroundings were, and what his life was like on that ranch for which he risked it. In the midst of this speculation she fell asleep, and lay wearily in dreamless repose for many hours.

She was shocked by the surrender that she had made to that unknown man. Perhaps he was nothing more than a thief, as charged, and this story fixing his identification had been only a fabrication. An honest man would have had no necessity for such haste, such wild insistence of his right to love her. It seemed, in the light of due reflection, the rude way of an outlawed hand.

Then there came the soft pleading of something deeper to answer for Alan Macdonald, and to justify his rash deed. He had risked life to see her and set himself right in her eyes, and he had doubled the risk in standing there in the garden, defiantly proud, unbent, and unrepentant, refusing to leave her without some favor to carry away.

There was only a sigh to answer it, after all; only a hope that time would bring her neither shame nor regret for that romantic passage in the dusky garden path. That she had neither shame nor regret in that hour was her sweetest consolation. More, she was comfortable in the security that the secret of that swift interlude was her own. Honest man or thief, Alan Macdonald was not the man to speak of that.

Yes; miss would see him. Ask him to wait. The maid’s ear was true; it was the major’s ring. She came bounding upstairs to report on it, her breath short, her eyes big.

“Oh, miss! I think something must ’a’ happened to him, he looks all shook!” she said.

“Nonsense!” said Frances, a little flutter of apprehension, indefinable, cold, passing through her nerves in spite of her bearing and calm face.

Major King had remained standing, waiting her. He was handsome and trim in his uniform, dark-eyed, healthy-skinned, full of the vigor of his young manhood. The major’s face was pale, his carriage stiff and severe. He appeared as if something might have happened to him, indeed, or to somebody in whom he was deeply concerned.

Frances knew that her face was a picture of the worriment and straining of her past night, for it was a treacherous mirror of her soul. She smiled as she made a little pause in the reception-room door. Major King bowed, with formal, almost official, dignity. His hand was in the bosom of his coat, and he drew it forth with something white in it as she approached.

“Permit me,” said he, placing the folded white thing in her outstretched fingers.

“What is it? Not—it isn’t—” she stammered, something deeper than surprise, than foreboding, in her eyes and colorless cheeks.

“Unmistakably yours,” he said; “your name is stamped in it.”

“It must be,” she owned, her spirits sinking low, her breath weak between her lips. “Thank you, Major King.”

The glove was soiled with earth-marks; it was wrinkled and drawn, as if it had come back to her through conflict and tragedy. She rolled it deliberately, in a compact little wad, her fingers as cold as her hope for the life of the man who had borne it away. She knew that Major King was waiting for a word; she was conscious of his stern eyes upon her face. But she did not speak. As far as Major King’s part in it went, the matter was at an end.

“Miss Landcraft, I am waiting.”

Major King spoke with imperious suggestion. She started, and looked toward him quickly, a question in her eyes.

“I sha’n’t keep you then,” she returned, her words little more than a whisper.

“No; and I shall not ask you, Major King.”

“But I demand of you to know how it came in that man’s possession! Tell me that—tell me!”

He stood before her, very near to her. His hands were shaking, his eyes gleaming with fury.

“I might ask you with as much reason how it came in yours,” she told him, resentful of his angry demand.

“A messenger arrived with it an hour ago.”

“For you, Major King?”

“For me, certainly.”

She had no need to ask him whence the messenger came. She could see the horsemen returning to the ranchhouse by the river in the gray morning light, in the triumph of their successful hunt. Alan Macdonald had fallen. It had been Nola’s hand that had dispatched this evidence of what she could but guess to be the disloyalty of Frances to her betrothed. If Nola had hoped to make a case with the major, Frances felt she had succeeded better than she knew.

“Then there is nothing more to be said, Major King,” said she, after a little wait.

“There is much more,” he insisted. “Tell me that he snatched the glove from you, tell me that you lost it—tell me anything, and I’ll believe you—but tell me something!”

“There is nothing to tell you,” said she, resentful of the meddling of Nola Chadron, which his own light conduct with her had in a manner justified.

“Then I can only imagine the truth,” he told her, bitterly. “But surely you didn’t give him the glove, surely you cannot love that wolf of the range, that cattle thief, that murderer!”

“You have no right to ask me that,” she said, flashing with resentment.

“I have a right to ask you that, to ask you more; not only to ask, but to demand. And you must answer. You forget that you are my affianced wife.”

“But you are not my confessor, for all that.”

“God’s name!” groaned King, his teeth set, his eyes staring as if he had gone mad. “Will you shame us both? Do you forget you are my affianced wife?”

“That is ended—you are free!”

“Frances!” he cried, sharply, as in despair of one sinking, whom he was powerless to save.

“It is at an end between us, Major King. My ‘necessity’ of explaining everything, or anything, to you is wiped away, your responsibility for my acts relieved. Lift your head, sir. You need not blush before the world for me!”

Sweat was springing on the major’s forehead; he drew his breath through open lips.

“I refuse to humor your caprice—you are irresponsible, you don’t know what you are doing,” he declared. “You are forcing the issue to this point, Frances, I haven’t demanded this.”

“You have demanded too much. You may go now, Major King.”

“It’s only the infatuation of a moment. You can’t care for a man like that, Frances,” he argued, shaken out of his passion by her determined stand.

“This is not a matter for discussion between you and me, sir.”

Major King bowed his head as if the rebuke had crushed him. She stood aside to let him pass. When he reached the door she turned to him. He paused, expectantly, hopefully, as if he felt that a reconciliation was dawning.

“If it hadn’t been for you they wouldn’t have discovered him last night,” she charged. “You betrayed him to his enemies. Can you tell me, then—will you tell me—is Alan Macdonald—dead?”

Major King stood, his stern eyes on the glove, unrolled again, now dangling in her hand.

“If he was a gentleman, as you said of him once, then he is dead,” said he.

He turned and left her. She did not look after him, but stood with the soiled glove spread in her hands, gazing upon it in sad tenderness.