limb. For the first moments after the rock was
released he had turned sick and dizzy. Now, as they came near--the
thing relentless but inanimate pursuing the thing helpless, beautiful
and most precious to him of all things in the world, not the quiver of
a muscle hindered the desperate task that he had set himself.

A moment later he was sobbing like a child as he half dragged, half
carried Pauline to his waiting horse. By the magic of luck, by the
mystery of a protecting Fate, the lariat noose had fallen about her
shoulders. To the amazed and terrified Indians up the cliff she had
soared suddenly, spirit-like, out of the trench and vanished in the
foliage of the tree, while the boulder thundered on, cheated of its
prey.

But swiftly out of the woods upon the open plain below appeared a rider
with a woman clasped before him on the saddle.

The baffled Indians scurried for their horses. They reached the
valley. They gained upon the burdened horseman and his tired horse.
They fired as they rode, the bullets spitting venomously in the dust
around Harry and Pauline.

The pony stumbled. Harry jerked it up and it struggled bravely on, but
the cries behind sounded louder.

The bullets hit nearer.

Suddenly the firing increased. There were more cries. And Harry,
reining the pony saw, galloping over the ridge to the westward, the
full posse of Hal Haines. They fired as they came. They cut between
him and the Indians. He stopped the pony and lifted Pauline to the
ground.

"My precious one, God bless you and forgive us all," sobbed Mrs. Haines
as Polly was caught in her mothering embrace. "And you--you had to
come all the way from New York to save her," she added, turning to
Harry.

"Don't say anything about it, Mrs. Haines," he said in a stage
whisper. "I came out here to rest and avoid publicity."

CHAPTER XVI

SOPHIE MCALLAN'S WEDDING

A few days after their return from Montana Pauline sat reading by the
library window. They had come late to the country this Summer and the
park of Castle Marvin had had time to leave and bloom into utter
splendor. It was like a flowery kingdom in the Land of Faery, and as
her eyes were lifted listlessly now and then from the printed page,
they roamed over the garden which lay like some vast and radiant
Oriental rug in Nature's palace hall. The distant forest was the
palace wall, tapestried in green; its dome, a sky of tender blue; its
lamp, the morning