and took a cloak down from a peg and wrapped
it about her while she waited for the biscuit to bake. At supper they sat
down together, the man and his wife and their three children. The children
were in fine spirits from the fun they had had that afternoon. Never had
daddy been so nice to them. He had taught Topeka to throw the lasso so
well that she had caught the cat once and little Jim twice; and daddy had
played he was a buffalo and had charged them all with his head down, till
they screamed in terror. But daddy seemed more quiet through the meal, and
once mother started up and cried:

"What's that?"

She ran to the door with her hand pressed to her side, but daddy called
after her:

"Don't you know the cowards better than that? They'll wait for nightfall."

But these things had not worried the children, with their heads full of
playing buffalo and throwing the lariat.

"Jim," said his father, before they went to bed, "remember you are the man
of the family." But young Jim was already nodding with sleep. Topeka and
Judith were sleepy, too; they kissed their father and were glad to go to
bed.

The night began menacingly to close over the wilderness. Where the sun had
hung above the mountain a moment before there glowed a great pool of red
that dripped across the blackness in faint tricklings. The outlines of the
foot-hills loomed huge, formless, uncouth. In the half-light it seemed a
world struggling in the birth-throes. All day the dry, burning heat had
quivered over the desert, like hot-air waves flickering over a bed of live
coals, and now the very earth seemed to palpitate with the intensity of
its fever. The bellowing of the thirst-maddened cattle had not stopped
with the twilight that brought no dew to slake their parched throats. In
the hills the coyotes wailed like lost souls. It was night bereft of
benisons, day made frightful by darkness. All the heat of a cycle of
desert summers seemed concentrated in that house in the valley where the
man and his wife waited. Each sound of the desert night Alida translated
into the trampling of horses' feet; then, as the sound would die away, or
prove to be but some night noise of the wilderness, the pallor would lose
its pinch on her features, and she would stare into her husband's face
with eyes that did not see. Jim smoked his pipe and refilled it, smoked
and filled again, but gave no sign of the object of his waiting.

"Jim," she said, when the clock had struck