led on his gun-belt, and, extinguishing the light,
he hurried out.

A crescent moon had just tipped the bluff. The village lanes and cabins
and trees lay silver in the moon-light. A lonesome coyote barked in the
distance. All else was still. The air was cool, sweet, fragrant. There
appeared to be a glamour of light, of silence, of beauty over the
desert.

Slone kept under the dark lee of the bluff and worked around so that he
could be above the village, where there was little danger of meeting
any one. Yet presently he had to go out of the shadow into the
moon-blanched lane. Swift and silent as an Indian he went along,
keeping in the shade of what trees there were, until he came to the
grove of cottonwoods. The grove was a black mystery lanced by silver
rays. He slipped in among the trees, halting every few steps to listen.
The action, the realization had helped to make him cool, to steel him,
though never before in his life had he been so exalted. The pursuit and
capture of Wildfire, at one time the desire of his heart, were as
nothing to this. Love had called him--and life--and he knew death hung
in the balance. If Bostil found him seeking Lucy there would be blood
spilled. Slone quaked at the thought, for the cold and ghastly
oppression following the death he had meted out to Sears came to him at
times. But such thoughts were fleeting; only one thought really held
his mind--and the one was that Lucy loved him, had sent strange, wild,
passionate words to him.

He found the narrow path, its white crossed by slowly moving black bars
of shadow, and stealthily he followed this, keen of eye and ear,
stopping at every rustle. He well knew the bench Lucy had mentioned. It
was in a remote corner of the grove, under big trees near the spring.
Once Slone thought he had a glimpse of white. Perhaps it was only
moonlight. He slipped on and on, and when beyond the branching paths
that led toward the house he breathed freer. The grove appeared
deserted. At last he crossed the runway from the spring, smelled the
cool, wet moss and watercress, and saw the big cottonwood, looming dark
above the other trees. A patch of moonlight brightened a little glade
just at the edge of dense shade cast by the cottonwood. Here the bench
stood. It was empty!

Slone's rapture vanished. He was suddenly chilled. She was not there!
She might have been intercepted. He would not see her. The
disappointment, the sudden relaxation, was horrible. Then a