ht have felt something of all this. But she heeded
nothing of the hour, and saw nothing of the picture before her. Her
eyes only visualized the scenes that a world of troubled and
apprehensive thought yielded her. Her mind and heart were full of a
great terror, a terror which left her helpless and dazed.

She stirred restlessly. Time and again she changed her position. Now
she was leaning against one casing of the doorway, now against the
other. A nervous glance over her shoulder, as some sound in the
darkness of the room behind her set her shivering, told of the
state of her nerves, as also, with ears ever on the alert, her
fearful glances at a definite spot in the rapidly dimming hills told
of a straining, harassed expectancy. Her nerves were almost at
breaking-point. Her handsome face was drawn and haggard. All the
youthful freshness seemed to have vanished from it forever, leaving
her radiant eyes shadowed and hopeless. It was a painful change. But
the outward and visible signs were nothing to the changes that had
taken place within her.

Thirty yards away a decrepit choreman was making pretense of some work
upon a corral fence. But it was only pretense. His real occupation was
espionage. His red-rimmed eyes never for a moment lost sight of his
master's woman when she showed herself in the open. A curious-looking
dog of immense proportions, half mastiff, half Newfoundland, squatted
on its haunches at his side, alternating his green-eyed attention
between a watchful regard for the hand that fed and thrashed it and
the woman at the doorway. There was not much to choose between the
faces of these wardens of the ranch. Both were cruel, both were
intensely vicious. In neither pair of eyes was there any friendliness
for the woman. And it needed little imagination to understand that
both possessed to the full all the instincts of the savage watch-dog.

But Jessie had no thought for either. Her own terrible thoughts and
feelings held her. It is doubtful if she was even aware of their
presence at all. Just now one thought stood out dominant in her mind.
She was expecting the return of--James. And the return of James
meant--She shuddered.

He was returning from his expedition in the neighborhood of Suffering
Creek, and this knowledge brought with it the remembrance that his
object was to give her possession of at least one of her children.
Distracted as she was with her mother's desire for possession of her
offspring, al