r plaint, the sounds of
the desert night swept across the stony walls of the canon. Alida knew
that it must have happened at the dead cotton-woods. There were no other
high trees about for miles. Again she listened before advancing. There was
no sound of hoof or champing bit or men moving quickly. They had gone
their way into the valley. She ran swiftly, her lantern throwing its beam
across the scrubby inequalities of ground, but for her there was no need
of its beacon. To-night she was beyond the halting, stumbling
uncertainties of tread to which man is subject. There was magic in her
feet and in her hands and brain. Like the wind she ran, the wind on the
great plain where there are no foot-hills to hinder its course. The black,
dead trees stood out distinctly against the starry sky, and from a
cross-limb of one of them dangled something with head awry, like a broken
jumping-jack, something that had once been a man--and her husband. She
could touch the feet of this frightful thing and feel its human warmth. A
wind came up from the desert and blew across the canon's rocky walls into
the valley, and the parody of a man swayed to it.

She had been expecting this thing. For weeks the image of it had been
graven on her heart. Sleeping or waking, she had seen nothing but his
dangling body from the cross-limb. Yet with the actual consummation before
her, she felt its hideous novelty as though it were unexpected. At sight
of it the force that had borne her up through the happenings of that day
went out of her, and as she stood with the knife and the rope, that she
had brought in the hope of cheating the lynchers, dangling from her
nerveless hand her helplessness overcame her. Again and again she called
to the dead man for help, called to him as she had been accustomed to call
when her woman's strength had been unequal to some heavy household task.

Far down the trail she could hear the gallop of a horse coming closer, and
mingled with the sounds of its flying feet was a voice urging the horse to
greater speed in the shrill cabalistic "Hi-hi-hi-ki!" of the plains-man.
What was it--one of them returning to see that she did not cheat the rope
of its due?--to hang her beside him, as an after-thought, as they hanged
Kate Watson beside her man? Let them. She was standing near the swaying
thing when horse and rider gained the ground beside her, and what was left
to her of consciousness made out that the rider was Judith. She pointed t