Bar K Ranch paysack and posses are
forming, but the new sheriff has sworn to take him single-handed.
BROTHER excitedly asserts that the sheriff can do it,--a regular
fellow, that new sheriff,--looks and acts just like a man in a
movie! He regrets that his sister was not at home the day he came to
see them--the one time she'd left the station for more than an hour.
She'd have liked him fine! They excitedly discuss the chances of the
bandit's coming their way, for just beyond their station is the
famous Pass through the mountains, through which so many rogues have
ridden to freedom. In feverish haste BROTHER gets out his clumsy
pistol and loads it, to her timid distress. Their drab day has
turned to scarlet; he talks glowingly of the new sheriff, envies
him.... Instrument clicks again. It is the sheriff, asking if they
have seen a solitary horseman, and saying that he is on his way
there, to watch the Pass.

BROTHER gets himself so wrought up that he brings on a fit of
coughing and she makes him go back to bed.

Left alone again in the front room, she tries to settle down to her
sewing, but she sings as she rocks--

"In days of old
When knights were bold,
And barons held their sway--"

Then, childishly, half ashamed, she begins to "pretend." She snatches
off the red table cover and drapes it about herself for a train,
casts the crude furniture for the roles of moat and drawbridge and
castle wall, and herself for a captive princess, held by a robber
chief, flinging herself into her fantasy with such abandon that she
does not hear the approaching hoof beats. At the pinnacle of her big
speech the door is wrenched open and THE MAN stands there, a gun in
each hand, demanding--

"Who's here?"

It fits in with her make-believe so amazingly that for an instant she
is dazed and can hardly tell reality from romance, but then she
gathers herself and says with a little gasp--

"Why, Mister Sheriff, we aren't hiding THE HAWK!"

THE MAN, who is, of course, the bandit, instantly catches her mistake
and poses as the sheriff. She asks him eagerly if she may send a
message for him, to cover up her confusion as she takes off her
table-cloth train. Then, realizing that she has betrayed their
secret, she throws herself on his mercy and tells of her brother's
fail