ith two
cow-boys as his only companions, and half a hundred well-armed bandits
on their way to murder him. A grim tale for the ears of a woman who
was waiting word from Mexico.

A woman heard it out--John Slaughter's young bride. He had brought her
to the ranch-house a few months before and in these first days of her
happiness, a happiness made the more poignant by those deep anxieties
which the brave-souled women of the frontier had to bear, she listened
to the announcement which abiding dread had foreshadowed during many a
lonely night. When the rider had departed she ordered a team harnessed
to the buckboard and set forth for Mexico within the hour.

It was growing late when she passed the customhouse; they had no
confirmation of the rumor for her there, nor contradiction either; the
best they could do was to try to hearten her and to advise her to
wait. But she shook her head at the advice and drove on southward in
the darkness. She was alone. Blackness hid the land before her; save
for the drumming of the hoofs and the scrape of the wheels in the
rough roadway there was no sound. The wilderness remained silent,
invisible, offering no sign of what tragedy it held for her.

The night passed; gray dawn came; the sky flamed above the ragged
crests of the Sierra Madre; the sun climbed past the mountain wall;
morning grew on toward noon. Far to the south--so tenuous at first
that it barely showed against the clear air, now thickening until it
was unmistakable at last--a gray-brown dust column was climbing into
the cloudless sky. It came on toward her as she urged on the jaded
team, the signal of an advancing herd.

She strained her eyes and saw the thin, undulating line beneath it;
the sun gleamed on the tossing horns of the cattle, their lowing
sounded faint with distance, growing into a deep pulsating moan. She
distinguished the dots of horsemen in the van; and now one rode on
swiftly before the moving mass. She recognized her husband from afar.

John Slaughter had seized his opportunity while the bandits were
drinking to their own good luck and his death in the mescal shop. He
and John Roberts, his foreman, had taken the treasure-laden mules up a
steep-walled canyon five miles away. When the murderers followed the
hot trail they found themselves, with the coming of darkness, in the
narrowest part of the defile, so neatly ambushed that they wheeled
their horses and rode down the gorge in full flight before the fig