ved by the single purpose to reach at once the
new-found babe. Two horses in front of the hastening multitude ran at
their topmost speed and distanced all the others. One carried Pierre
Delarue and the other Doctor Long, and behind them came horsemen,
carts, carriages and people on foot, all rushing to the one point.

The physician administered such restoratives as he had with him and
brought the boy back to consciousness. Then, in the shade of a canopy
phaeton, he carried the child home in his arms, while Marguerite and
her father and Emerson Mead followed in another carriage, and all the
crowd came pouring along after them.

But there were four men who stayed behind. Joe Davis and John Daniels
and two others, all in perfect accord and friendliness, went back to
find Antone Colorow. They had listened to Mead's hastily told story of
how Antone had attacked and delayed him. Daniels and Davis had looked
at each other with a single significant glance and the one remark,
"We'd better attend to him!" And then they had taken the other two men
and started back.

They found Antone Colorow still struggling, rolling and kicking on the
ground. His lips were stained with the blood his own teeth had drawn,
and his red beard was flecked with foam. They untied him, and he
sprang to his feet and would have darted away, intent on his one
purpose to kill the enemy who had escaped his vengeance, had not quick
hands seized him. They tied his arms behind him and set him astride
his own horse, and then, surrounding him, with their revolvers drawn,
they rode away to the southwest, leaving Las Plumas far to their
right. On to the river bottom they went, and into a _bosque_ where the
cottonwoods and the sycamores grew thickly and the willow underbrush
was dense.

Long afterward a river ranchman, hunting a lost cow, penetrated the
_bosque_ and started back in sudden fright from a dangling, decaying
body that hung from a sycamore limb.

Pierre Delarue insisted that Emerson Mead should come into his house
for some wine and wait until they should know the worst or the best
concerning little Paul. He sat alone in the room where first he had
seen Marguerite, his anxiety about the child driven quite out of his
mind by the thought that the long hours alone with her, out on the
hills, their hearts and minds united in a common purpose, had come to
an end, that she was soon to be another man's wife, and that he would
never see her again. After a tim