llie was dimly aware of moving forms ahead and across the
street. Once, fearfully, she looked back, to see if they were followed.

The cowboy halted, tottering against a house, He seemed pale and
smiling.

"Run--Allie!" he whispered.

"No--no--no!" she replied, clinging to him. "You're shot!... Oh,
Larry--come on!"

"TELL--MY PARD--NEALE--"

His head fell back hard against the wood and his body, sagging, lodged
there. Life had passed out of the gray face. Larry Red King died
standing, with a gun in each hand, and the name of his friend the last
word upon his lips.

"Oh, Larry--Larry!" moaned Allie.

She could not run. She could scarcely walk. Dark forms loomed up. Her
strength failed, and as she reeled, sinking down, rude hands grasped
her. Above her bent the gleaming face and glittering eyes of Durade.

28

Beauty Stanton opened her eyes to see blue sky through the ragged vents
of a worn-out canvas tent. An unusual quietness all around added to
the strange unreality of her situation. She heard only a low, mournful
seeping of wind-blown sand. Where was she? What had happened? Was this
only a vivid, fearful dream?

She felt stiff, unable to move. Did a ponderous weight hold her down?
Her body seemed immense, full of dull, horrible ache, and she had no
sensation of lower limbs except a creeping cold.

Slowly she moved her eyes around. Yes, she was in a tent--an abandoned
tent, old, ragged, dirty; and she lay on the bare ground. Through a wide
tear in the canvas she saw a stretch of flat ground covered with stakes
and boards and denuded frameworks and piles of debris. Then grim reality
entered her consciousness. Benton was evacuated. Benton was depopulated.
Benton--houses, tents, people--had moved away.

During her unconsciousness, perhaps while she had been thought dead, she
had been carried to this abandoned tent. A dressing-gown covered her,
the one she always put on in the first hours after arising. The white
dress she had worn last night--was it last night?--still adorned her,
but all her jewelry had been taken. Then she remembered being lifted to
a couch and cried over by her girls, while awestruck men came to look at
her and talk among themselves. But she had heard how the cowboy's shot
had doomed her--how he had fought his way out, only to fall dead in the
street and leave the girl to be taken by Durade.

Now Beauty Stanton realized that she had been left alone in an abandoned
tent of an aban