EYES OPEN. Missou, I need y'u. We're going back. I reckon y'u
better hang on to the stirrup, for we got to travel some. Adios,
senorita!"

He was off at a slow lope on the road he had just come, the other man
running beside the horse. Presently he stopped, as if the arrangement
were not satisfactory; and the second man swung behind him on the pony.
Later, when she turned in her saddle, she saw that they had left the
road and were cutting across the plain, as if to take the sharpshooter
in the rear.

Her troubled thoughts stayed with her even after she had reached the
ranch. She was nervously excited, keyed up to a high pitch; for she knew
that out on the desert, within a mile or two of her, men were stalking
each other with life or death in the balance as the price of vigilance,
skill and an unflawed steel nerve. While she herself had been in danger,
she had been mistress of her fear. But now she could do nothing but
wait, after ordering out such reinforcements as she could recruit
without delay; and the inaction told upon her swift, impulsive
temperament. Once, twice, the wind brought to her a faint sound.

She had been pacing the porch, but she stopped, white as a sheet. Behind
those faint explosions might lie a sinister tragedy. Her mind projected
itself into a score of imaginary possibilities. She listened, breathless
in her tensity, but no further echo of that battlefield reached her. The
sun still shone warmly on brown Wyoming. She looked down into a rolling
plain that blurred in the distance from knobs and flat spaces into a
single stretch that included a thousand rises and depressions. That roll
of country teemed with life, but the steady, inexorable sun beat down
on what seemed a shining, primeval waste of space. Yet somewhere in
that space the tragedy was being determined--unless it had been already
enacted.

She wanted to scream. The very stillness mocked her. So, too, did the
clicking windmill, with its monotonous regularity. Her pony still stood
saddled in the yard. She knew that her place was at home, and she fought
down a dozen times the tremendous impulse to mount and fly to the field
of combat.

She looked at her watch. How slowly the minutes dragged! It could not
be only five minutes since she had looked last time. Again she fell to
pacing the long west porch, and interrupted herself a dozen times to
stop and listen.

"I can bear it no longer," she told herself at last, and in another
moment w