way to love a little!"

He bent towards her; to brush her cheek lightly as they rode was but to
imply his appreciation of the scene as a bit of chiaroscuro, the panorama
of the desert night, eternal romance typified by the man and woman scaling
the heights, the goddess of love lighting them on their way by her flaming
torch. But Judith, who said little because she felt much, was in no mood
to brook such dalliance, and, urging the mare sharply, she cantered down
the divide at peril of life and limb. Peter, cursing the heavy-footed
beast he rode, came stumbling after.

Judith rode wildly through the night, leaving Peter laps behind, to
beseech, to prophesy dire happening if she should slip, and to scramble
after, as best he might, on the heavy-footed beast he repudiated, with all
his ancestors, as oxen, to the fourth generation. But the woman kept her
pace. She had stern questions to put to herself, and they were likely to
have truer answers if Peter were elsewhere than riding beside her. Whither
was he going? They had met casually on a trail known to few honest men. It
led over a spur of the Wind River to a sort of no man's land, the
hiding-place of horse and cattle thieves. She had gone to warn her
brother. Could he be going there--She could not bring herself to finish.

Her heart was divided against itself. Within it were fought again the red
and the white man's battles, bitterly, and to the finish. And now the
white man, with his open warfare, won, and all her love rose up and
scourged her little faith. She would wait on the trail for Peter, penitent
and ashamed. And while she waited suspicions bred of her Indian blood
stirred distrustfully, and she told herself that her mother's daughter
made a worthy champion of the ways of white men. Did Hamilton hunt her
brother gallowsward, making merry with her the meantime? He had not even
been courteously concerned as to where she was going when they met on the
divide. They had met and ridden together as casually as if it had been the
most natural thing for them both to be taking the horse-thief trail as a
summer evening's ride. And she had not thought to wonder at his possible
destination, when the man from whom she rode in terror through the night
proved to be Peter, because the lesser question of his errand had been
swallowed up in the greater miracle of his presence.

She was by this time well down the divide. The temperature had risen
perceptibly on the down grade. The