ed.
"It's about his size," she murmured.

Her old lover helped her in silence to mount into the man's saddle--this
they had often done together in former years--and so they took their way
down the silent road. They had not many miles to go, and after the first
two lay behind them, when the horses were limbered and had been put to
a canter, they made time quickly. They had soon passed out of the trees
and pastures of Box Elder and came among the vast low stretches of the
greater valley. Not even by day was the river's course often discernible
through the ridges and cheating sameness of this wilderness; and beneath
this half-darkness of stars and a quarter moon the sage spread shapeless
to the looming mountains, or to nothing.

"I will ask you one thing," said Lin, after ten miles.

The woman made no sign of attention as she rode beside him.

"Did I understand that she--Miss Buckner, I mean--mentioned she might be
going away from Separ?"

"How do I know what you understood?"

"I thought you said--"

"Don't you bother me, Lin McLean." Her laugh rang out, loud and
forlorn--one brief burst that startled the horses and that must have
sounded far across the sage-brush. "You men are rich," she said.

They rode on, side by side, and saying nothing after that. The Drybone
road was a broad trail, a worn strip of bareness going onward over
the endless shelvings of the plain, visible even in this light; and
presently, moving upon its grayness on a hill in front of them, they
made out the wagon. They hastened and overtook it.

"Put your carbine down," said McLean to Lusk. "It's not robbers. It's
your wife I'm bringing you." He spoke very quietly.

The husband addressed no word to the cow-puncher "Get in, then," he said
to his wife.

"Town's not far now," said Lin. "Maybe you would prefer riding the
balance of the way?"

"I'd--" But the note of pity that she felt in McLean's question overcame
her, and her utterance choked. She nodded her head, and the three
continued slowly climbing the hill together.

From the narrows of the steep, sandy, weather-beaten banks that the
road slanted upward through for a while, they came out again upon the
immensity of the table-land. Here, abruptly like an ambush, was the
whole unsuspected river close below to their right, as if it had emerged
from the earth. With a circling sweep from somewhere out in the gloom
it cut in close to the lofty mesa beneath tall clean-graded descents of
sa