led way. She was handsome, after her
wild, half-civilized type, and her anxiety for his welfare touched him
and besought his interest.

"Indians go far down--" She swept her arm down the narrowing river
valley. "Catch fish. Peppajee stay--no can walk far. I stay. All go,
mebbyso stay five days." Her hand lifted involuntarily to mark the
number.

He did not know why she told him all that, and he could not learn from
her anything about his assailant. She had been walking along the bluff,
he gathered--though why, she failed to make clear to him. She had, from
a distance, caught a glimpse of a man watching the valley beneath him.
She had seen him raise a rifle, take long aim, and shoot--and she had
known that he was shooting at Good Indian.

When he asked her the second time what was her errand up there--whether
she was following the man, or had suspected that he would be there--she
shook her head vaguely and took refuge behind the stolidity of her race.

In spite of her pleading, he put his horse to scrambling up the first
slope which it was possible to climb, and spent an hour riding, gun in
hand, along the rim of the bluff, much as he had searched it the evening
before.

But there was nothing alive that he could discover, except a hawk which
lifted itself languorously off a high, sharp rock, and flapped lazily
out across the valley when he drew near. The man with the rifle had
disappeared as completely as if he had never been there, and there
was not one chance in a hundred of hunting him out, in all that rough
jumble.

When he was turning back at last toward Hartley, he saw Rachel for a
moment standing out against the deep blue of the sky, upon the very rim
of the bluff. He waved a hand to her, but she gave no sign; only, for
some reason, he felt that she was watching him ride away, and he had a
brief, vagrant memory of the wistfulness he had seen in her eyes.

On the heels of that came a vision of Evadna swinging in the hammock
which hung between the two locust trees, and he longed unutterably to be
with her there. He would be, he promised himself, within the next hour
or so, and set his pace in accordance with his desire, resolved to make
short work of his investigations in Hartley and his discussion of late
events with Miss Georgie.

He had not, it seemed to him, had more than two minutes with Evadna
since that evening of rapturous memory when they rode home together from
the Malad, and afterward sat upon t