she could not worry very much
about anything. Her mother slept uneasily to prove that the battle had
not gone altogether against the girl who had fought the night through.
She had her reward in full measure when the doctor came, in the heat of
noon, and after terrible minutes of suspense for Billy Louise while he
counted pulse and took temperature and studied symptoms, told her that
she had done well, and that she and her homely poultices had held back
tragedy from that house.

Billy Louise lay down upon the couch out on the back porch and slept
heavily for three hours, while Phoebe and the doctor watched over her
mother.

She woke with a start. She had been dreaming, and the dream had taken
from her cheeks what little color her night vigil had left. She had
dreamed that Ward was in danger, that men were hunting him for what he
had done at that corral. The corral seemed the center of a fight
between Ward and the men. She dreamed that he came to her, and that
she must hide him away and save him. But though she took him to
Minervy's cave, which was secret enough for her purpose, yet she could
not feel that he was safe, even there. There was something--some
menace.

Billy Louise went softly into the house, tiptoed to the door of her
mother's room, and saw that she lay quiet, with her eyes closed.
Beside the window the doctor sat with his spectacles far down toward
the end of his nose, reading a pale-green pamphlet that he must have
brought in his pocket. Phoebe was down by the creek, washing clothes
in the shade of a willow-clump.

She went into her own room, still walking on her toes. In her trunk
was a blue plush box of the kind that is given to one at Christmas. It
was faded, and the clasp was showing brassy at the edges. Sitting upon
her bed with the box in her lap, Billy Louise pawed hastily in the
jumble of keepsakes it held: an eagle's claw which she meant sometime
to have mounted for a brooch; three or four arrowheads of the shiny,
black stuff which the Indians were said to have brought from
Yellowstone Park, a knot of green ribbon which she had worn to a St.
Patrick's Day dance in Boise; rattlesnake rattles of all sizes; several
folded clippings--verses that had caught her fancy and had been put
away and forgotten; an amber bead she had found once. She turned the
box upside down in her lap and shook it. It must be there--the thing
she sought; the thing that had troubled her most in her dream; the