ck here; it's only back East. I don't
think it's so very warm, nohow."

"Oh, it's hot enough," sniffled Mrs. Sproul, relaxing her spine under
Melissa's sympathy; "but it ain't altogether the heat. I don't like
Lysander bein' mixed up with murderers and dangerous characters; not but
what he's able to pertect himself, havin' been through the war, but it
seems as if the harmlessest person wuzn't safe when folks go 'round
shootin' right an' left without no provocation whatever. I think we'll
all be safer when that young feller's locked up in San Quentin,--which
they'll do with him, Lysander thinks."

Mrs. Sproul drew a corner of her apron tight over her finger, and
carefully wiped a speck from the corner of the baby's eye, gazing
intently into the serene vacuity of its sleeping countenance as she
spoke.

Melissa caught her breath, and turned and gazed fixedly through the
shimmering haze of the valley toward Los Angeles. The girl herself did
not know the resolution that was shaping itself from all the tangled
facts and fancies of her brain. Perhaps, if she had been held to strict
account, she would have said it was an impulse, "a sudden notion" in her
parlance, that prompted her to arise the next morning, before the
faintest thrill of dawn, and turn her steps toward the town in the
valley. It was not a hopeful journey, and she could not analyze the
motive that lashed her into making it; nevertheless she felt relieved
when the greasewood shut the cabin, with its trailing pepper-trees and
dusty figs and geraniums, from her sight, and she was alone on the
mountain road. It was not a pleasure to go, but it was an undeniable
hardship to stay. There had been no fog in the night, and from the warm
stillness of the early morning air the girl knew that the heat had not
abated. She was quite unmindful of the landscape, gray and brown and
black in the waning light of the misshapen and belated moon, and she was
far from knowing that the man she was making this journey to save would
have thought her a fitting central figure in the soft blur of the
Millet-like etching of which she formed a part.

She threw back her sunbonnet and trudged along, carrying her shoes tied
together by their leathern strings and hung across her arm,--an
impediment to progress, but a concession to urban prejudices which she
did not dream of disregarding. She meant to put them on in the seclusion
of the Arroyo Seco, where she could bathe her dusty feet and res