room I waited till the house was all quiet.
Then I started for Calabasas. When I came back I got up to my room
without being seen, and sat at the window a long time. I waited till
all the men stopped riding past. Then I climbed through the window and
down the kitchen roof, and let myself down to the ground. Some more
men came past, and I hid on the porch and slipped over to the horse
barns and found a hackamore, and went down to the corral and hunted
around till I found this little pinto--she's the best to ride
bareback."

"I could ride a razorback--why take all that trouble for me?"

"If you don't start while you have a chance, you undo everything I
have tried to do to avoid a fight."

The wind, stirring softly, set the aspen leaves quivering. The stars,
chilled in the thin, clear night air, hung diamond-like in the heavens
and the eastern sky across the distant desert paled for the rising
moon. The two standing at the horse's head listened a moment together
in the darkness. De Spain, leaning forward, said something in a low,
laughing voice. Nan made no answer. Then, bending, he took her hand
and, before she could release it, caught it up to his lips.

* * * * *

For a long time after he had gone she stood, listening for a
shot--wondering, breathless at moments, whether de Spain could get
past the waiting traps. The moon came up, and still lingering, torn
with suspense, she watched a drift of fleecy clouds darken it. She
scanned anxiously the wrinkled face of the desert which, with a
woman's craft, hides at night the accidents of age. It seemed to Nan
as if she could overlook every foot of the motionless sea for miles
before her; but she well knew how much it could conceal of ambush and
death even when it professed so fairly to reveal all. Strain her ears
as she would, the desert gave back no ripple of sound. No shot echoed
from its sinister recesses--not even the clatter of retreating hoofs.

De Spain, true to all she had ever heard of his Indian-like stealth,
had left her side unabashed and unafraid--living, laughing, paying
bold court to her even when she stubbornly refused to be courted--and
had made himself in the twinkling of an eye a part of the silence
beyond--the silence of the night, the wind, the stars, the waste of
sand, and of all the mystery that brooded upon it. She would have
welcomed, in her keen suspense, a sound of some kind, some reminder
that he yet