another of the group
that made up her little world--Peter Hamilton, Kitty Colebrooke, Jim, his
family--thoughts inconsequent as the dancing dust-devils that whirled over
that infinity of space, and, whirling, disappeared and reappeared at some
new corner of the compass.

The trail that she must take to Jim's camp in the mountain was known to
but few honest men. Fugitives from justice--the grave, impersonal justice
of the law, or the swift justice of the plains--found there an asylum. And
while they sometimes suffered, in death by thirst or hunger, a sentence
more dreadful than the law of the land or the law of the rope would have
given them, the desert, like the sea, seldom gave up her own. It was more
than probable that no woman except Alida Rodney had ever taken that trail
before, and reasonably certain that no woman had ever taken it alone.
Dolly, when she saw the beds of alkali grow more frequent, and that the
trails of the range cattle turned back, sniffed the lack of water in the
air, slackened her pace, and turned an interrogatory ear towards her
mistress.

"It's all right, old girl"; the gauntleted hand patted the satin neck.
"We're in for"--Judith flung her head up and confronted the infinite
desolation yawning to the sky-line--"God knows what."

Dolly broke into a light canter; this evidently was not an occasion for
dawdling. There was a touch of business about the way the reins were held
that made the mare settle down to work. But her flying hoofs made little
apparent progress against the space and silence of the desert. Five, ten,
fifteen miles and the curving shoulder of the mountain, that she must
cross, still mocked in the distance. Only the sun moved in that vast world
of seemingly immutable forces.

There was no stoic Sioux in Judith now. The girl that breasted the crests
of the foot-hills shrank in terror from the loneliness and the suggestion
of foes lurking in ambush. The sun dropped behind the mountain, leaving a
blood-red pool in his wake, like fugitive Cain. Already night was sweeping
over the earth from mountain shadows that flowed imperceptibly together
like blackened pools. To the girl following the trail the silence was more
dreadful than a chorus of threatening voices. She listened till the
stillness beat at her ears like the stamping of ten thousand hoofs, then
pulled up her horse, and the desert was as still as the chamber of death.

"Ah, Dolly, my dear, a house is the place for women