u mind throwing those old flowers away now?" she said, glancing
at the spoils which Boyle still carried.

"Why?" he asked.

"Oh, they're too ridiculous. Please do."

"May I keep one?" he asked, with the first intonation of masculine
weakness in his voice.

"If you like," she said, a little coldly.

Boyle selected a small spray of myrtle and cast the other flowers
obediently aside.

"Dear me, how ridiculous!" she said.

"What is ridiculous?" he asked, lifting his eyes to hers with a slight
color. But he saw that she was straining her eyes in the distance.

"Why, there don't seem to be any horses to the coach!"

He looked. Through a gap in the furze he could see the vehicle now quite
distinctly, standing empty, horseless and alone. He glanced hurriedly
around them; on the one side a few rocks protected them from the tangled
rim of the ridge; on the other stretched the plain. "Sit down, don't
move until I return," he said quickly. "Take that." He handed back her
pistol, and ran quickly to the coach. It was no illusion; there it stood
vacant, abandoned, its dropped pole and cut traces showing too plainly
the fearful haste of its desertion! A light step behind him made him
turn. It was Miss Cantire, pink and breathless, carrying the cocked
derringer in her hand. "How foolish of you--without a weapon," she
gasped in explanation.

Then they both stared at the coach, the empty plain, and at each
other! After their tedious ascent, their long detour, their protracted
expectancy and their eager curiosity, there was such a suggestion of
hideous mockery in this vacant, useless vehicle--apparently left to them
in what seemed their utter abandonment--that it instinctively affected
them alike. And as I am writing of human nature I am compelled to say
that they both burst into a fit of laughter that for the moment stopped
all other expression!

"It was so kind of them to leave the coach," said Miss Cantire faintly,
as she took her handkerchief from her wet and mirthful eyes. "But what
made them run away?"

Boyle did not reply; he was eagerly examining the coach. In that brief
hour and a half the dust of the plain had blown thick upon it, and
covered any foul stain or blot that might have suggested the awful
truth. Even the soft imprint of the Indians' moccasined feet had been
trampled out by the later horse hoofs of the cavalrymen. It was these
that first attracted Boyle's attention, but he thought them the marks
made by