t. All of this had required about two
minutes and in the meantime his eyes had been busy, still rummaging.

There was a box nailed to the wall with a cloth over it. In it he
found what he expected; a lot of jerked beef, dry and hard. He filled
his pockets, his mouth already full. On a table was a flour sack; he
put into it the bulk of the remaining beef, some coffee and sugar, a
couple of cans of milk. Then he looked out at the Mexican. The man
still lay in the gorged torpor of the afternoon _siesta_.

"What will he think?" chuckled Kendric, "when he finds his larder
raided and this on the table?"

_This_ was a twenty dollar gold piece, enough to pay many times over
the amount of the commandeered victuals. Kendric took up sack and
rifle, had another mouthful of _frijoles_ and beef, and went out the
way he had come. And, all the way up the slope, he chuckled to himself.

"Enough to last Betty and me a week," he estimated. "And a place to
get more if need be. That hombre will pray the rest of his life to be
raided again.--And never a shot fired!"

He ate as he went, enough to keep life and strength in him but not all
that his hunger craved. For he thought of Betty hungering and waiting
in that hideous loneliness of uncertainty, and had no heart for a
solitary meal. But in fancy, over and over, he feasted with her, and
beans and jerked beef and coffee boiled in a milk-can made a banquet.

He hastened all that he could to return to her, though he knew that
speeding along the trail could hardly bring him to her a second
earlier. For he would, in the end, be constrained to wait for the
coming of night before he climbed again to their camp. He realized
soberly that Betty must not again fall into Zoraida's hands; that the
result, inevitably, would be her death. Were Zoraida mad or sane, she
was filled with a frenzy of blood lust. There was danger enough
without his increasing it for the sake of coming an hour sooner with
food. In one day Betty would not starve and fast she must.

But there was satisfaction in drawing steadily closer to her. He
traveled as cautiously as he had come, he stopped in many places of
concealment whence he could overlook miles of country, he followed not
the shortest paths but the safest. And the sun was still high when he
came to the last ridge and looked down the canon and across and saw the
cliffs of home. In his thoughts it was home.

All day long, save for the herder, h