"You set 'im free?" repeated the Girl, timidly, and not daring to meet
his gaze.

"I let him go," announced the Sheriff in spite of himself.

"You let 'im go?" questioned the Girl, still in a daze.

"That's our verdict, an' we're prepared to back it up," declared Sonora
with a smile on his weathered face, though the tears streamed down his
cheeks.

The Girl's face illumined with a great joy. She did not stop now to
dissipate the tears which she saw rolling down Sonora's face, as was her
wont when any of the boys were grieved or distressed, but fairly flew
out of the cabin, calling half-frantically, half-ecstatically:

"Dick! Dick! You're free! You're free! You're free . . .!"

The minutes passed and still the miners did not move. They stood with an
air of solemnity gazing silently at one another. Only too well did they
realise what was happening to them. They were inconsolable. Presently,
Sonora, all in a heap on a bench, took out some tobacco and began to
chew it as fast as his mouth would let him; Happy, going over to the
teacher's desk, picked up the bunch of berries which he had presented
her at the opening of the school session and began to fondle them; while
Trinidad, too overcome to speak, stood leaning against the door, gazing
sadly in the direction that the Girl had taken. As for Rance, after
calling to Nick to bring him a drink, he quietly brought out a pack of
cards from his pocket and, seemingly, became absorbed in a game of
solitaire.

A little while later, his eyes still red from weeping, Nick remarked:

"The Polka won't never be the same, boys--the Girl's gone."

XVIII.

The soft and velvety blackness of night was giving place to a pearly
grey, and the feathery streaks of a trembling dawn were shooting
heavenward when a man, whose head had been pillowed on a Mexican saddle,
rose from the ground in front of a tepee, made of blankets on crossed
sticks, and seated himself on an old tree-stump where he proceeded to
light a cigarette.

In the little tepee, sheltered by an overhanging rock, the Girl was
still sleeping; and the man, sitting opposite the mound of earth and
rock on which it was built, was Johnson.

A week had passed since the lovers had left Cloudy Mountain, and each
day, at the moment when the sun burst above the snow-capped mountains,
found them up and riding slowly eastward. No attempt whatever was made
at haste, but, instead, now climbing easily to the top of the passes,