with that tool of
his, Pinck Johnson, searching high and low for her as that man had said.
Everybody would help him but me. I was all the friend she had. Even
those two good people who were inquiring were helping Gowdy. I must
drive where he could not find us. I must!

"He can't take you from me," I declared, "unless you want to go!"

"What can you do?" she urged wildly. "You are too young to stand in his
way. Nobody can stand in his way. Nobody ever did! And they are two to
one. Let us hide! Let us hide!"

"I can stand in anybody's way," I said, "if I want to."

I was not really afraid of them if worst came to worst, but I did see
that it was two to one; so I thought of evading the search, but the
hiding of a team of four cows and a covered wagon on the open Iowa
prairie was no easy trick. If I turned off the road my tracks would
show for half a mile. If once the problem of hiding my tracks was
solved, the rest would be easy. I could keep in the hollows for a few
miles until out of sight of the Ridge Road, and Gowdy might rake the
wayside to his heart's content and never find us except by accident; but
I saw no way of getting off the traveled way without advertising my
flight. Of course Gowdy would follow up every fresh track because it was
almost the only thing he could do with any prospect of striking the
girl's trail. I thought these things over as I drove on westward. I
quieted her by saying that I had to think it out.

It was a hot afternoon by this time, and looked like a stormy evening.
The clouds were rolling up in the north and west in lofty thunderheads,
pearl-white in the hot sun, with great blue valleys and gorges below,
filled with shadows. Virginia, in a fever of terror, spent a part of her
time looking out at the hind-end of the wagon-cover for Gowdy and Pinck
Johnson, and a part of it leaning over the back of the seat pleading
with me to leave the road and hide her. Presently the clouds touched the
sun, and in a moment the day grew dark. Far down near the horizon I
could see the black fringe of the falling rain under the tumbling
clouds, and in a quarter of an hour the wind began to blow from the
storm, which had been mounting the sky fast enough to startle one. The
storm-cloud was now ripped and torn by lightning, and deep rumbling
peals of thunder came to our ears all the time louder and nearer. The
wind blew sharper, and whistled shrilly through the rigging of my
prairie schooner, there came a f