etely in this little while? He believed she was
entering the shadow of some slow-growing illness, which bore down her
spirits in an uninterpreted foreboding of evil days to come.

What a pretty figure she made in the saddle, riding away from him in
that slow canter; how well she sat, how she swayed at the waist as her
nimble animal cut in and out among the clumps of sage. A mighty pretty
girl, and as good as they grew them anywhere. It would be a calamity to
have her sick. From the shoulder of the slope he looked back again.
Pretty as any woman a man ever pictured in his dreams.

She passed out of sight without looking back, and there rose a picture
in his thoughts to take her place, a picture of dark, defiant eyes, of
telltale hair falling in betrayal of her disguise, as if discovering
her secret to him who had a right to know.

The fancy pleased him; as he worked to repair the damage she had
wrought, he smiled. How well his memory retained her, in her transition
from anger to scorn, scorn to uneasy amazement, amazement to relief.
Then she had smiled, and the recognition not owned in words but spoken
in her eyes, had come.

Yes, she knew him; she recalled her challenge, his acceptance and
victory. Even as she rode swiftly to obey him out of that mad encounter
in the valley over there, she had owned in her quick act that she knew
him, and trusted him as she sped away.

When he came to the place where she had ridden through, he pieced the
wire and hooked the ends together, as he had told her he would do. He
handled even the stubborn wire tenderly, as a man might the
appurtenances to a rite. Perhaps he was linking their destinies in that
simple act, he thought, sentimentally unreasonable; it might be that
this spot would mark the second altar of his romance, even as the little
station of Misery was lifted up in his heart as the shrine of its
beginning.

There was blood on his knuckles where the vicious wire had torn him. He
dashed it to the ground as a libation, smiling like one moonstruck, a
flood of soft fancies making that bleak spot dear.

CHAPTER XIV

NOTICE IS SERVED

Taterleg was finding things easier on his side of the ranch. Nick Hargus
was lying still, no hostile acts had been committed. This may have been
due to the fierce and bristling appearance of Taterleg, as he humorously
declared, or because Hargus was waiting reenforcements from the penal
institutions of his own and surrounding states.