“I’ve stood up for that man, and I’ve stood by him,” said Banjo Gibson, “but when a man shoots a friend of my friend he ain’t no friend of mine. I’m done with him; I won’t never set a boot-heel inside of his door ag’in.”

Banjo was in Mrs. Chadron’s south sitting-room, with its friendly fireplace and homely things, including Mrs. Chadron and her apparently interminable sock. Only now it was a gray sock, designed not for the mighty foot of Saul, but for Chance Dalton, lying on his back in the bunkhouse in a fever growing out of the handling that he had gone through at Macdonald’s place.

Banjo had arrived at the ranch the previous evening. He was sitting now with his fiddle on his knee, having gone through the repertory most favored by his hostess, with the exception of “Silver Threads.” That was an afternoon melody, Banjo maintained, and one would have strained his friendship and shaken his respect if he had insisted upon the musician putting bow to it in the morning hours.

“Busted his right arm all to pieces, they tell me?”

“Right here.” Mrs. Chadron marked across her wrist with her knitting needle, and shook her head in heavy sadness.

“That’ll kind of spile him, won’t it?”

“Well, Saul says it won’t make so much difference about him not havin’ the use of his hand on that side if it don’t break his nerve. A man loses confidence in himself, Saul says, most always when he loses the hand or arm he’s slung his gun with all his life. He takes the notion that everybody’s quicker’n he is, and just kind of slinges back and drops out of the game.”

“Do you expect Saul he’ll come back here with them soldiers he went after?”

“I expect he’ll more’n likely order ’em right up the river to clear them rustlers out before he stops or anything,” she replied, in high confidence.

“The gall of them low-down brand-burners standin’ up to fight a man on his own land!” Banjo’s indignation could not have been more pointed if he had been a lord of many herds himself.

“There comes them blessed girls!” reported Mrs. Chadron from her station near the window. Banjo crossed over to see, his fiddle held to his bosom like an infant. Nola and Frances were nearing the gate.

“That colonel girl she’s a up-setter, ain’t she?” Banjo admired.

“She’s as sweet as locus’ blooms,” Mrs. Chadron declared, unstintingly.

“But she’s kind of distant; nothing friendly and warm-hearted like your little Nola, mom.”

“She’s a little cool to strangers, but when she knows a body she comes out.”

Banjo nodded, drawing little whispers of melody from his fiddle-strings by fingering them against the neck.

“I noticed when she smiles she seems to change,” he said. “It’s like puttin’ bow to the strings. A fiddle’s a glum kind of a thing till you wake it up; she’s that way, I reckon.”

“Well, git ready for dinner—or lunch, as Nola calls it—they’ll be starved by this time, ridin’ all the way from the post in this chilly wind. I’m mighty afraid we’re goin’ to have some weather before long.”

“Can’t put it off much longer,” Banjo agreed, thinking of the hardship of being caught out in one of those sweeping blizzards, when the sudden cold grew so sharp that a man’s banjo strings broke in the tense contraction. That had happened to him more than once, and it only seemed to sharpen the pleasure of being snowed in at a place like Alamito, where the kitchen was fat and the hand of the host free. He smiled as he turned to the kitchen to wash his face and soap his hair.

The twenty men gathered in a hurry-call by Chadron to avenge the defeat of Chance Dalton, who had in their turn been met and unexpectedly repulsed by the homesteaders, as Chadron had related in his own way to Colonel Landcraft, were lying in camp several miles up the river. That is, all that were left of them fit for duty after the fight. A good many of them were limping, and would limp for many a day.

They were waiting the arrival of the troops, which they expected with the same confidence Mrs. Chadron had held before Nola brought her an explanation that covered the confusion of refusal.

Neither of the young women knew of the tiff between the colonel and Chadron, for the colonel was a man who kept his family apart from his business. Chadron had not seen fit to uncover his humiliation to his daughter, but had told her that he was acting on the advice of Colonel Landcraft in sending to his friends in Cheyenne for men to put down the uprising of rustlers himself.

“Sing us that dreamy one, Banjo,” Nola requested, “the one that begins ‘Come sit by my side little—’ you know the one I mean.”

A sentimental tenderness came into Banjo’s face. He turned his head so that he could look out of the window into the thickening landscape beyond the corral gate, gray and mysterious and unfriendly now as a twilight sea. Nola touched Frances’ arm to prime her for the treat.

“Watch his face,” she whispered, smiling behind her hand.

Banjo struck the chords of his accompaniment; the sentimental cast of his face deepened, until it seemed that he was about to come to tears. He sang:

The chorus:

There was a great deal more of that song, which really was not so bad, the way Banjo sang it, for he exalted it on the best qualities that lived in his harmless breast; not so bad that way, indeed, as it looks in print. Frances could not see where the joke at the little musician’s expense came in, although Nola was laughing behind his unsuspecting back as the last notes died.

Mrs. Chadron wiped her eyes. “I think it’s the sweetest song that ever was sung!” she said, and meant it, every word.

Banjo said nothing at all, but put away his instrument with reverent hands, as if no sound was worthy to come out of it after that sweet agony of love.

Mrs. Chadron got up, in her large, bustling, hospitable way, sentimentally satisfied, and withal grossly hungry.

“Oh, poor old Chance!” Nola pitied, “I’ve been sitting here enjoying myself and forgetting all about him. I’ll take it down to him, mother—Banjo he’ll come with me.”

Banjo was alert on the proposal, and keen to go. He brought Nola’s coat at her mother’s suggestion, for the evening had a feeling of frost in it, and attended her to the kitchen after the chicken broth as gallantly as if he wore a sword.

Mrs. Chadron came back from her investigations in the kitchen in a little while to Frances, who waited alone before the happy little fire in the chimney. She sighed as she resumed her rocking-chair by the window, and crossed her seldom idle hands over her comfortably inelegant front.

“It’ll be some little time before supper’s ready to set down to,” she announced regretfully. “Maggie’s makin’ stuffed peppers, and they’re kind of slow to bake. We can talk.”

“Of course,” Frances agreed, her mind running on the hope that had brought her to the ranch; the hope of seeing Macdonald, and appealing to him in pity’s name for peace.

“That thievin’ Macdonald’s to blame for Chance, our foreman, losin’ the use of his right hand,” Mrs. Chadron said, with asperity. “Did Nola tell you about the fight they had with him?”

“Yes, she told me about it as we came.”

“It looks like the devil’s harnessed up with that man, he does so much damage without ever gittin’ hurt himself. He had a crowd of rustlers up there with him when Chance went up there to trace some stock, and they up and killed three of our cowboys. Ain’t it terrible?”

“It is terrible!” Frances shuddered, withholding her opinion on which side the terror lay, together with the blame.

“Then Saul went up there with some more of the men to burn that Macdonald’s shack and drive him off of our land, and they run into a bunch of them rustlers that Macdonald he’d fetched over there, and two more of our men was killed. It looks like a body’s got to fight night and day for his rights now, since them nesters begun to come in here. Well, we was here first, and Saul says we’ll be here last. But I think it’s plumb scan’lous the way them rustlers bunches together and fights. They never was known to do it before, and they wouldn’t do it now if it wasn’t for that black-hearted thief, Macdonald!”

“Did you ever see him?” Frances asked.

“No, I never did, and don’t never want to!”

“I just asked you because he doesn’t look like a bad man.”

“They say he sneaked in here the night of Nola’s dance, but I didn’t see him. Oh, what ’m I tellin’ you? Course you know that—you danced with him!”

“Yes,” said Frances, neither sorry nor ashamed.

“But you wasn’t to blame, honey,” Mrs. Chadron comforted, “you didn’t know him from Adamses off ox.”

Frances sat leaning forward, looking into the fire. The light of the blaze was on her face, appealingly soft and girlishly sweet. Mrs. Chadron laid a hand on her hair in motherly caress, moved by a tenderness quite foreign to the vindictive creed which she had pronounced against the nesters but a little while before.

“I’m afraid you’re starved, honey,” she said, in genuine solicitude, thus expressing the nearest human sympathy out of her full-feeding soul.

“I’m hungry, but far from starving,” Frances told her, knowing that the confession to an appetite would please her hostess better than a gift. “When do you expect Mr. Chadron home?”

“I don’t know, honey, but you don’t need to worry; them rustlers can’t pass our men Saul left camped up the valley.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that; I’m not afraid.”

Mrs. Chadron chuckled. “Did I tell you about Nola?” she asked. Then, answering herself, before Frances could more than turn her head inquiringly; “No, of course, I never. It was too funny for anything!”

“What was it?” Frances asked, in girlish eagerness. Mrs. Chadron’s smile was reflected in her face as she sat straight, and turned expectantly to her hostess.

“The other evening when she and her father was comin’ home from the postoffice over at the agency they run acrosst that sneak Macdonald, afoot in the road, guns so thick on him you couldn’t count ’em. Saul asked him what he was skulkin’ around down this way for, and the feller he was kind of sassy about it, and tried to pass Nola and go on. He had the gall to tip his hat to her, just like she was low enough to notice a brand-burner! Well, she give him a larrup over the face with her whip that cut the hide! He took hold of her bridle to shove her horse out of the way so he could run, I reckon, and she switched him till he squirmed like a puppy-dog! I laughed till I nearly split when Saul told me!”

Mrs. Chadron surrendered again to her keen appreciation of the humor in that situation. Frances felt now that she understood the attitude of the cattlemen toward the homesteaders as she never had even sensed it before. Here was this motherly woman, naturally good at heart and gentle, hardened and blinded by her prejudices until she could discuss murder as a thing desired, and the extirpation of a whole community as a just and righteous deed.

In a moment Mrs. Chadron was grave again. She put out her hand in that gentle, motherly way and touched Frances’ hair, smoothing it from her forehead, pleased with the irrepressible life of it which sprung it back after the passage of her palm like water in a vessel’s wake.

“I let on to you a little while ago that I wasn’t uneasy, honey,” she said, “but I ain’t no hand at hidin’ the truth. I am uneasy, honey, and on pins, for I don’t trust them rustlers. I’m afraid they’ll hear that Saul’s gone, and come sneakin’ down here and burn us out before morning, and do worse, maybe. I don’t know why I’ve got that feelin’, but I have, and it’s heavy in me, like raw dough.”

“I don’t believe they’d do anything like that,” Frances told her.

“Oh, you don’t know ’em like we do, honey, the low-down thieves! They ort to be hunted like wolves and shot, wherever they’re found.”

“Some of them have wives and children, haven’t they?” Frances asked, thinking aloud, as she sat with her chin resting in her hand.

“Oh, I suppose they litter like any other wolves,” Mrs. Chadron returned, unfeelingly.

“Tratala con cariña que es mi persona,” sounded Maggie, a degree louder. Mrs. Chadron sat upright, with a new interest in life apart from her uneasy forebodings about the rustlers. Maggie was in the dining-room, spreading the cloth. The peppers were coming along.

Somebody burst into the kitchen; uncertain feet came across it; a cry broke Maggie’s song short as she jingled the silver in place on the cloth. Banjo Gibson stumbled into the room where the low fire twinkled in the chimney, reeling on his legs, his breath coming in groans.

Maggie was behind him, holding the door open; the light from the big lamp on the dining-table fell on the musician, who weaved there as if he might fall. His hat was off, blood was in his eyes and over his face from a wound at the edge of his hair.

“Nola—Nola!” he gasped.

Mrs. Chadron, already beside him, laid hold of him now and shook him.

“Tell it, you little devil—tell it!” she screamed.

Frances, with gentler hand, drew Banjo from her.

“What’s happened to Nola?” she asked.

“The rustlers!” he said, his voice falling away in horror.

“Nola, Nola!” she called, running out into the garden. Her wild voice came back from there in a moment, crying her daughter’s name in agony.

Banjo had sunk to the floor, his battered face held in his hands.

“My God! they took her!” he groaned. “The rustlers, they took her, and I couldn’t lift a hand!”

Frances beckoned to Maggie, who had followed her mistress to the kitchen door.

“Give him water; stop the blood,” she ordered sharply.

In a moment she had dashed out after Mrs. Chadron, and was running frantically along the garden path toward the river.

Frances stopped at the high wire fence along the river bank. It was dark there between the shrubs of the garden on one hand and the tall willows on the other, but nothing moved in them but her own leaping heart. She called Mrs. Chadron, running along the fence as she cried her name.

Mrs. Chadron answered from the barn. Frances found her saddling a horse, while Maggie’s husband, an old Mexican with a stiff leg, muttered prayers in his native tongue as he tightened the girths on another.

Mrs. Chadron was for riding in pursuit of Nola’s abductors, although she had not mounted a horse in fifteen years. There was no man about the place except crippled old Alvino, and wounded Dalton lying in the men’s quarters near at hand. Neither of them was serviceable in such an emergency, and Banjo, willing as he would be, seemed too badly hurt to be of any use.

Frances pressed her to dismiss this intention. Even if they knew which way to ride, it would be a hopeless pursuit.

“There’s only one way to go—towards the rustlers’ settlement,” Mrs. Chadron grimly returned.

“You can’t go alone with Alvino, Mrs. Chadron.”

“I’ve got to go, I tell you—let loose of me!”

She shook off Frances’ restraining hand and turned to her horse again. With her hand on the pommel of the saddle she stopped, and turned to Alvino.

“Go and fetch me Chance’s guns out of the bunkhouse,” she ordered.

Alvino hitched away, swinging his stiff leg, with laborious, slow gait.

“You couldn’t do anything against a crowd of desperate men—they might kill you!” Frances said.

“Let ’em kill me, then!” She lifted her hand, as if taking an oath. “They’ll pay for this trick—every man, woman, and child of them’ll bleed for what they’ve done to me tonight!”

“Let Alvino go to the camp up the river where Mr. Chadron left the men, and tell them; they can do more than you.”

“You couldn’t drive him alone out of sight of the lights in the house with fire. He’d come back with some kind of a lie before he’d went a mile. I’ll go to ’em myself, honey—I didn’t think of them.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“Wait till Alvino comes with them guns—I can use ’em better than I can a rifle. Oh, why don’t the man hurry!”

“I’ll run down and see what—”

But Alvino came around the corral at that moment. He had stopped to light a lantern, in his peculiar Mexican mode of estimating the importance of time and occasion, and came flashing it in short, violent arcs as he swayed to swing his jointless leg.

Frances led out the other horse and was waiting to mount when Alvino came panting up, the belt with its two revolvers over his arm. Mrs. Chadron jerked it from him with something hard and sharp on her tongue like a curse. Banjo Gibson came into the circle of light, a bandage on his head.

“I didn’t even see ’em. They knocked me down, and when I come to she was gone!”

Banjo’s voice was full of self-censure, and his feet were weak upon the ground. He began to talk the moment the light struck him, and when he had finished his little explanation he was standing beside Mrs. Chadron’s saddle.

“Go to the house and lie down, Banjo,” Mrs. Chadron said; “I ain’t time to fool with you!”

“Are you two aimin’ to go to the post after help?” Banjo steadied himself on his legs by clinging to the horse’s mane as he spoke.

“We’re goin’ up the river after the men,” Mrs. Chadron told him.

“No, I’ll go after the men; that’s a man’s job,” Banjo insisted. “I know right where they’re camped at, you couldn’t find ’em between now and morning.”

There was no arguing Banjo out of it, no brushing the little man aside. He was as firm as a man three times his weight, and he took Mrs. Chadron by the arm, like a son, and led her away from the horse with a manner at once so firm and yet considerate that it softened her stern heart and plunged her into tears.

“If you bring Nola back to me I’ll give her to you, Banjo! I’ll give her to you!” she sobbed, as she belted him with Chance Dalton’s guns.

“If any reward in this world could drive me through hell fire to lay my hands on it, you’ve named it,” he said.

Frances saw that Mrs. Chadron could be reasoned with now, and she was grateful to Banjo for his opportune arrival. For the night was vast and unfriendly over that empty land, and filled with a thousand shudderful dangers. She was afraid of it, afraid to leave the lights of the house behind her and ride out into it, no matter for all the peril that poor little Nola might be facing in that cruel hour.

Banjo rode away. They stood clinging to each other in the dim circle of Alvino’s lantern-light, listening to his horse until the distance muffled its feet on the road.

Frances took the lantern from old Alvino’s shaking hand.

“Let’s go and look for their tracks,” she suggested, forcing a note of eagerness into her words, “so we can tell the men, when they come back to pick up the trail, how many there were and which way they went.”

“Oh, if Chance was only able to go after them, if he was only able!” Mrs. Chadron wailed, following Frances as she hurried along the wire fence that cut the garden from the river.

“It was somebody that knowed the lay of the land,” Mrs. Chadron said, “for that gate down there back of the house is open. That’s the way they come and went—somebody that knowed the lay of the land.”

Frances felt her heart die within her as the recollection of another night in that garden flashed like red fire in her mind. There was a picture, as she stopped with closed eyes, struck cold and shuddering by a fear she dared not own, of one flying, bent into the shadows, along the garden path toward that gate. Someone who knew the “lay of the land!”

“Did you hear something?” Mrs. Chadron whispered, leaning close to her where she had stopped, stock-still, as if she had struck a wall.

“I thought I—I—saw something,” Frances answered, in faint, sick voice.

The white gate was swinging as the invaders had left it, and in the soft ground beyond it they found tracks.

“Only one man!” said Mrs. Chadron, bending over.

“There’s only one track,” said Frances, her breath so feeble, her heart laboring so weakly that she believed that she must die.

Alvino came up, and took the lead in tracking, with the aptness for that trick that goes with primitive minds such as his. Even in the farthest glimmer of the light he could pick up the trail, and soon he led them to the willows where the ravisher’s horse had been concealed.

“One shoe was lost,” said he, pointing, “left one, hind foot.”

Mrs. Chadron stood looking in the direction that the rider had gone with his precious burden, her eyes straining into the dark.

“Oh, if I’d ’a’ come down here place of saddlin’ that horse!” she lamented, with a pang for her lost opportunity.

“He’d have been gone, even then—I was past here and didn’t hear him,” Frances said.

“Well, it was somebody that knowed the lay of the land,” Mrs. Chadron was repeating, with accusing conviction.

They returned to the house, having done all that they could do. It was doubtful whether the dumb, plethoric nature of Mrs. Chadron made her capable of suffering as Frances suffered, even with her greater reason for pain of that cruel bereavement. Imaginative, refined, sensitive as a harp, Frances reflected every wild wrench of horror that Nola herself must have been suffering as the horseman bore her along in the thick night. She felt that she must scream, but that some frightful thing smothered the voice that struggled in her throat; that she must leap and flee away, but a cloying power was heavy on her limbs, binding her as if her feet were set in lava.

Perhaps they were not of the type that Macdonald described; maybe the cattlemen were just in their arraignment of them for thieves and skulking rascals, and Macdonald was no better than the reputation that common report gave him. The mere fact of his defense of them in words, and his association with them, seemed to convict him there in the silence of that black-walled court of night.

It was either that he was blinded to the deviltries of his associates by his own high intentions, or as shrewdly dishonest as any scoundrel that ever rode the wilds. He could be that, and carry it off before a sharper judge than she. So she said, finding it hard to excuse his blindness, if blindness it might be; unable to mitigate in any degree the blame, even passive knowledge of the intent, of that base offense.

At length, through all the fog of her groping and piecing together, she reached what she believed to be the motive which lay behind the deed. The rustlers doubtless were aware of the blow that Chadron was preparing to deliver upon them in retaliation for his recent losses. They had carried off his daughter to make her the price of their own immunity, or else to extract from him a ransom that would indemnify them for quitting their lairs in the land upon which they preyed.

She explained this to Mrs. Chadron when it became clear to her own mind. Mrs. Chadron seemed to draw considerable hope from it that she should receive her daughter back again unharmed in a little while.

The rest of the night the two women spent at the gate, and in the road up and down in front of it, straining for the sound of a hoof that might bring them tidings. Mrs. Chadron kept up a moaning like an infant whose distress no mind can read, no hand relieve. Now and then she burst into a shrill and sudden cry, and time and again she imagined that she heard Nola calling her, and dashed off along the road with answering shout, to come back to her sad vigil at the gate by and by on Frances’ arm, crushed by this one great and sudden sorrow of her life.

Frances cheered her as much as might be with promises of the coming day. At the first streak of dawn, she told Mrs. Chadron, she would ride to the post and engage her father in the quest for the stolen girl. Soldiers would be thrown out over the country for miles on every side; the cowards would be hemmed in within a matter of hours, and Nola would be at home, laughing over the experiences of her tragic night.

The tracks of the raider’s horse were deep in the soft soil. She followed them as they cut across the open toward the river road, angling northward. At a place where the horse had stopped and made a trampling in the lose earth—testimony of the fight that Nola had made to get away—Frances started at the sight of something caught on a clump of bull-berry bushes close at hand. She drew near the object cautiously, leaning and looking in the half light of early morning. Presently assured, she reached out and picked it up, and rode on with it in her hand.

Presently the trail merged into the river road, where hoofprints were so numerous that Frances was not skilful enough to follow it farther. But it was something to have established that the scoundrel was heading for the homesteaders’ settlement, and that he had taken the road openly, as if he had nothing to fear. Also, that bit of evidence picked from the bushes might serve its purpose in the right time and place.

When she came to the branching of the roads she pulled up her horse and sat considering her course a little while. Presently she rode forward again, but not on the road that led to the army post.

She had proceeded a mile, perhaps, along the road branching to the homesteaders’ settlement, upon which she knew Macdonald’s claim to lie somewhere up the river, when she rounded an elbow screened by tall-growing greasewood and came face to face with a small cavalcade of dusty men. At the head of them Alan Macdonald rode, beside an old man whose neck was guttered like a wasted candle and his branching great mustache gray as the dust on his bony shoulders.

She halted when she saw them, and they jerked up their horses also, with startled suddenness, like men riding in the expectation of danger and surprise. Macdonald came forward in a moment, with respectful salute, a look amounting almost to frightened questioning in his face. For the sun was not up yet, although its flame was on the heavens, and it was a strange, wild place to meet a woman of Frances Landcraft’s caste unattended, and with the shadow of a trouble in her face that made it old, like misery.

Frances was wearing the brown corduroy riding-habit that she had worn on the day when she first spoke to him. Her brown hair had fallen down until it hid her ears, for she had ridden hard, and a strand of it blew from beneath her cowboy hat in unheeded caress across her cheek.

Macdonald saw her stiffen in the saddle and lift herself a little from her seat as he drew near, his companions stopping a little distance back. Her eyes were stern and reproachful; a little frown troubled her white forehead.

“I was starting out to find you, Mr. Macdonald,” she said, severely.

“If there is any service, Miss Landcraft—”

“Don’t talk emptiness, and don’t pretend!” she said, a flash of anger in her face. “It isn’t a man’s way to fight, it’s a coward’s! Bring her back home!”

“I don’t know what you mean.” There was such an astonished helplessness in his manner that it would have convinced any unprejudiced mind of his innocence in itself.

“Oh!”—impatiently—“I can’t hurt you, I’m alone. You’d just as well tell me how much money you’re going to demand, so I can set their minds at rest.”

Macdonald’s face was hot; his eyes felt as if they swam in fire. He put out his hand in a gesture almost a command, his heavy eyebrows gathered in a frown, an expression of sternness in his homely face that made it almost majestic.

“If you’ll be good enough to tell me what your veiled accusations point to, Miss Landcraft, then I can answer you by either yes or no.”

She unbent so far as to relate briefly what she believed they knew better than herself already. But behind her high air as she talked there was a secret warm feeling for the strength of this man. It was a quality of fine steel in the human mind and body such as she never had seen so beautifully blended before. In her own father there was something of it, but only a reflection on water compared to this. It seemed the temper of the desert, she thought, like that oriental spirit which spread Islam’s dark creed over half the world.

“In the first place,” said he, speaking slowly, “there are no cattle thieves among the homesteaders in the settlement up the river, Miss Landcraft. I have told you this before. Here, I want you to meet some of them, and judge for yourself.”

He beckoned to Tom Lassiter and the three with him, and they joined him there before her. In a few words he told them who she was and the news that she carried, as well as the accusation that went with it.

“These men, their neighbors, and myself not only had no hand in this deed, but there’s not one among us that wouldn’t put down his life to keep that young woman from harm and give her back to her home. We have our grievances against Saul Chadron, God knows! and they are grave enough. But we don’t fight that way, Miss Landcraft.”

“If you’re innocent, then prove it by forcing the men that carried her off, or the man, if there was only one, to bring her back home. Then I’ll believe you. Maybe others will, too. What are you riding the road so early for, all armed and suspicious, if you’re such honest men?”

Frances had unrolled the bit of evidence that she had picked up from the bushes, and was holding it on the horn of her saddle now, quite unconscious of what her hands were doing, for she had forgotten the importance of her find in the heat of that meeting. Macdonald spurred forward, pointing to the thing in her hand.

“Where did you get that?” he asked, a sharp note of concern in his voice that made her start.

She told him. He took it from her and turned to his comrades.

“It’s Mark Thorn’s cap!” he said, holding it up, his fingers in the crown.

Tom Lassiter nodded his slow head as the others leaned to look.

“Saul Chadron’s chickens has come home to roost,” he said.

Frances understood nothing of the excitement that sprung out of the mention of the outlaw’s name, for Mark Thorn and his bloody history were alike unknown to her. Her resentment mounted at being an outsider to their important or pretended secret.

“Well, if you know whose cap it is, it ought to be easy for you to find the owner,” she said, unable to smother the sneer in her words.

“He isn’t one of us,” said a homesteader, with grim shortness.

“Oh!” said she, tossing her lofty head.

There was a pallor in Macdonald’s weathered face, as if somebody near and dear to himself was in extreme peril.

“She may never see home again,” he said. Then quickly: “Which way did he go, do you know?”

She told him what she knew, not omitting the lost horseshoe. Tom Lassiter bent in his saddle with eagerness as she mentioned that particular, and ran his eyes over the road like one reading the pages of a book.

“There!” he said, pointing, “I’ve been seein’ it all the way down, Alan. He was headin’ for the hills.”

Frances could not see the print of the shoeless hoof, nor any peculiarity among the scores of tracks that would tell her of Nola’s abductor having ridden that far along the road. She flushed as the thought came to her that this was a trick to throw her attention from themselves and the blame upon some fictitious person, when they knew whose hands were guilty all the time. The men were leaning in their saddles, riding slowly back on their trail, talking in low voices and sharp exclamations among themselves. She spurred hotly after them.

“Mr. Chadron hasn’t come home yet,” she said, addressing Macdonald, who sat straight in his saddle to hear, “but they expect him any hour. If you’ll say how much you’re going to demand, and where you want it paid, I’ll carry the word to him. It might hurry matters, and save her mother’s life.”

“I’m sorry you repeated that,” said Macdonald, touching his hat in what he plainly meant a farewell salute. He turned from her and drew Tom Lassiter aside. In a moment he was riding back again the way that he had come.

Frances looked at the unaccountable proceeding with the eyes of doubt and suspicion. She did not believe any of them, and had no faith in their mysterious trackings and whisperings aside, and mad gallopings off to hidden ends. As for Tom Lassiter and his companions, they ranged themselves preparatory to continuing their journey.

“If you’re goin’ our way, colonel’s daughter,” said Tom, gathering up his bridle-reins, “we’ll be proud to ride along with you.”

Frances was looking at the dust-cloud that rose behind Macdonald. He was no longer in sight.

“Where has he gone?” she inquired, her suspicion growing every moment.

“He’s gone to find that cowman’s child, young lady, and take her home to her mother,” Tom replied, with dignity. He rode on. She followed, presently gaining his side.

“Is there such a man as Mark Thorn?” she asked after a little, looking across at Lassiter with sly innuendo.

“No, there ain’t no man by that name, but there’s a devil in the shape of a human man called that,” he answered.

“He hires out to kill off folks that’s in the way of the cattlemen at so much a head, miss; like some hires out to kill off wolves. The Drovers’ Association hires him, and sees that he gits out of jail if anybody ever puts him in, and fixes it up so he walks safe with the blood of no knowin’ how many innocent people on his hands. That’s what Mark Thorn does, ma’am. Chadron brought him in here a couple of weeks ago to do some killin’ off amongst us homesteaders so the rest ’d take a scare and move out. He give that old devil a list of twenty men he wanted shot, and Alan Macdonald’s got that paper. His own name’s at the top of it, too.”

“Oh!” said she, catching her breath sharply, as if in pain. Her face was white and cold. “Did he—did he—kill anybody here?”

“He killed my little boy; he shot him down before his mother’s eyes!”

Tom Lassiter’s guttered neck was agitated; the muscles of his bony jaw knotted as he clamped his teeth and looked straight along the road ahead of him.

“Your little boy! Oh, what a coward he must be!”

“I’m sorry I said that, Mr. Lassiter,” she confessed, hanging her head like a corrected child.

“He can’t hear you now,” said Tom.

They rode on a little way. Tom told her of the other outrages for which Thorn was accountable in that settlement. She was amazed as deeply as she was shocked to hear of this, for if any word of it had come to the post, it had been kept from her. Neither was it ever mentioned in Chadron’s home.

“No,” said Tom, when she mentioned that, “it ain’t the kind of news the cattlemen spreads around. But if we shoot one of them in defendin’ our own, the news runs like a pe-rairie fire. They call us rustlers, and come ridin’ up to swipe us out. Well, they’s goin’ to be a change.”

“But if Chadron brought that terrible man in here, why should the horrible creature turn against him?” she asked, doubt and suspicion grasping the seeming fault in Lassiter’s tale.

“Chadron refused to make settlement with him for the killin’ he done because he didn’t git Macdonald. Thorn told Alan that with his own bloody tongue.”

Lassiter retailed to her eager ears the story of Macdonald’s capture of Thorn, and his fight with Chadron’s men when they came to set the old slayer free, as Lassiter supposed.

“Yes, I know now.” She turned, and looked back. Remorse was heavy on her for the injustice she had done Macdonald that day, and shame for her sharp words bowed her head as she rode at old Tom Lassiter’s hand.

“He’ll run the old devil down ag’in,” Tom spoke confidently, as of a thing that admitted no dispute, “and take that young woman home if he finds her livin’. Many thanks he’ll git for it from them and her. Like as not she’ll bite the hand that saves her, for she’s a cub of the old bear. Well, let me tell you, colonel’s daughter, if she was to live a thousand years, and pray all her life, she wouldn’t no more than be worthy at the end to wash that man’s feet with her tears and dry ’em on her hair, like that poor soul you’ve read about in the Book.”

Frances slowed her horse as if overcome by a sudden indecision, and turned in her saddle to look back again. Again she had let him go away from her misunderstood, his high pride hurt, his independent heart too lofty to bend down to the mean adjustment to be reached through argument or explanation. One must accept Alan Macdonald for what his face proclaimed him to be. She knew that now. He was not of the mean-spirited who walk among men making apology for their lives.

“He’s gone on,” said Lassiter, slowing his horse to her pace.

“I’m afraid I was hasty and unjust,” she confessed, struggling to hold back her tears.

“Yes, you was,” said Lassiter, frankly, “but everybody on the outside is unjust to all of us up here. We’re kind of outcasts because we fence the land and plow it. But I want to tell you, Macdonald’s a man amongst men, ma’am. He’s fed the poor and lifted up the afflicted, and he’s watched with us beside our sick and prayed with us over our dead. We know him, no matter what folks on the outside say. Well, we’ll have to spur up a little, ma’am, for we’re in a hurry to git back.”

They approached the point where the road to the post branched.

“There’s goin’ to be fightin’ over here if Chadron tries to drive us out,” Tom said, “and we know he’s sent for men to come in and help him try it. We don’t want to fight, but men that won’t fight for their homes ain’t the kind you’d like to ride along the road with, ma’am.”

“Maybe the trouble can be settled some other way,” she suggested, thinking again of the hope that she had brought with her to the ranch the day before.

Tom’s voice was slow and solemn when he quoted that Mosaic injunction. The appeal of the disinherited was in it, and the pain of lost years. It touched her like a sorrow of her own. Tears were on her cheeks again as she parted from him, giving him her hand in token of trust and faith, and rode on toward the ranchhouse by the river.