idle. "You stay here!" he commanded gruffly.

"But, the Samuelsons! Mr. Samuelson is--" The words were drowned in a
shower of gravel as the rangy buckskin scrambled up the bank and
disappeared over the top. The rapid transition from anger to terror,
and from terror to relief, proved too much for the girl's nerves and
she burst into a violent fit of sobbing. The tears enraged her and she
shouted at the top of her voice. "I won't stay here!" but the words
sounded puny and weak, and she knew that they had not penetrated
beyond the rim of the ravine. "I won't do it! I won't stay here!" she
kept repeating, the sentences broken by the hysterical sobbing.
Nevertheless, stay there she did, until with a mighty rumble of hoofs
and a scattering volley of shots, the horse herd swept northward, and
when finally she succeeded in gaining the upper level, the sounds came
to her ears faint and far away.

Hurriedly she glanced about her. What was that stretching to the
southward, a long ribbon of white in the moonlight? "The trail!" she
cried. "The trail to town--and to Thompson's!" Just beyond the trail,
upon the brown-yellow buffalo grass a dark object lay motionless.
Patty stared at it in horror. It was the body of a man. Her first
impulse was to put spurs to her horse and fly down that long white
ribbon of trail--to place distance between herself and the thing that
lay sprawled upon the grass. Then a thought flashed into her brain.
Suppose it were he? Vil Holland, the man whom everybody trusted--the
man who had calmly braved the shots of the horse-thieves to rescue her
from that churning maelstrom of horror.

Unconsciously, but surely, under the influence of those upon whose
judgment she knew she could rely, her suspicion and distrust of him
had weakened. She had half-realized the fact days ago, when at thought
of him she found herself forced to enumerate his apparent offenses
over and over again to keep the distrust alive. She thought of him now
as he had fought his way to her, lashing the infuriated horses from
his path. He had appeared, somehow--different. She closed her eyes and
clean cut as though chiseled upon her brain was the picture of him as
he forced his way to her side. Like a flash the detail of difference
broke upon her--The jug was missing! And close upon the heels of the
discovery came the memory of the strange thrill that had shot through
her as his leg pressed hers when their horses had been forced together
by th