aid.

She withdrew her hands, discovering tears on her cheeks. Saying nothing,
she started to retrace the way of that mad, murderous race. She did not
resent his familiar address, if conscious of it at all, for he spoke
with the sympathetic tenderness one employs toward a suffering child.

They rode back to the fence without a word between them. When they came
to the cut wires he rode through as if he intended to continue on with
her to the ranchhouse, six or seven miles away.

"I can go on alone, Mr. Lambert," she said.

"My tools are down here a mile or so. I'll have to get them to fix this
hole."

A little way again in silence. Although he rode slowly she made no
effort to separate from his company and go her way alone. She seemed
very weary and depressed, her sensitive face reflecting the strain of
the past hour. It had borne on her with the wearing intensity of
sleepless nights.

"I'm tired of this fighting and contending for evermore!" she said.

Lambert offered no comment. There was little, indeed, that he could
frame on his tongue to fit the occasion, it seemed to him, still under
the shadow of the dreadful thing that he had averted but a little while
before. There was a feeling over him that he had seen this warm,
breathing woman, with the best of her life before her, standing on the
brink of a terrifying chasm into which one little movement would have
precipitated her beyond the help of any friendly hand.

She did not realize what it meant to take the life of another, even with
full justification at her hand; she never had felt that weight of ashes
above the heart, or the presence of the shadow that tinctured all life
with its somber gloom. It was one thing for the law to absolve a slayer;
another to find absolution in his own conscience. It was a strain that
tried a man's mind. A woman like Vesta Philbrook might go mad under the
unceasing pressure and chafing of that load.

When they came to where his tools and wire lay beside the fence, she
stopped. Lambert dismounted in silence, tied a coil of wire to his
saddle, strung the chain of the wire-stretcher on his arm.

"Did you know her before you came here?" she asked, with such
abruptness, such lack of preparation for the question, that it seemed a
fragment of what had been running through her mind.

"You mean----?"

"That woman, Grace Kerr."

"No, I never knew her."

"I thought maybe you'd met her, she's been away at school
somewhere--Omaha,