g is, one of you has
to be here all the time, y' understand."

Morse took the first watch and was followed by Stearns, who in turn
gave place to Barney. The days grew to a week. Sometimes West appeared
with a buyer in a cart or leading a pack-horse. Then the cached
fire-water would be diminished by a keg or two.

It was a lazy, sleepy life. There was no need for a close guard.
Nobody knew where the whiskey was except themselves and a few
tight-mouthed traders. Morse discovered in himself an inordinate
capacity for sleep. He would throw himself down on the warm, sundried
grass and fall into a doze almost instantly. When the rays of the sun
grew too hot, it was easy to roll over into the shade of the draw.
He could lie for hours on his back after he wakened and watch
cloud-skeins elongate and float away, thinking of nothing or letting
thoughts happen in sheer idle content.

He had never had a girl, to use the word current among his fellows.
His scheme of life would, he supposed, include women by and by, but
hitherto he had dwelt in a man's world, in a universe of space and
sunshine and blowing wind, under primitive conditions that made for
tough muscles and a clean mind trained to meet frontier emergencies.
But now, to his disgust, he found slipping into his reveries pictures
of a slim, dark girl, arrow-straight, with eyes that held for him only
scorn and loathing. The odd thing about it was that when his brain was
busy with her a strange exultant excitement tingled through his veins.

One day a queer thing happened. He had never heard of psychic
phenomena or telepathy, but he opened his eyes from a day-dream of her
to see Jessie McRae looking down at him.

She was on an Indian cayuse, round-bellied and rough. Very erect she
sat, and on her face was the exact expression of scornful hatred he
had seen in his vision of her.

He jumped to his feet. "You--here!"

A hot color flooded her face with anger to the roots of the hair.
Without a word, without another glance at him, she laid the bridle
rein to the pony's neck and swung away.

Unprotesting, he let her go. The situation had jumped at him too
unexpectedly for him to know how to meet it. He stood, motionless, the
red light in his eyes burning like distant camp-fires in the night.
For the first time in his life he had been given the cut direct by a
woman.

Yet she wasn't a woman after all. She was a maid, with that passionate
sense of tragedy which comes only t