nds held high
above their heads while the sweating musicians played fast and furious
and Jack and Pierre danced down the center of the hall.

She had danced many a time, but never in the clothes of a woman; so
they stared, mutely puzzled.

A thought came first to Jacqueline. It obliterated even the memory of
the yellow-haired girl and set her eyes dancing. She stepped close and
murmured her suggestion in the ear of Pierre. Whatever it was, it made
his jaw set hard and brought grave lines into his face.

She stepped back, asking: "Well?"

"We'll do it. What a little demon you are, Jack!"

"Then we'll have to start now. There's barely time."

They ran from the room together, and as they passed through the room
below Wilbur called after them: "The dance?"

"Yes."

"Wait and go with me."

"We ride in a roundabout way."

They were through the door as Pierre called back, and a moment later
the hoofs of their horses scattered the gravel down the hillside.
Jacqueline rode a black stallion sired by her father's mighty Thunder,
who had grown old but still could do the work of three ordinary horses
in carrying the great bulk of his master. The son of Thunder was
little like his sire, but a slender-limbed racer, graceful, nervous,
eager. A clumsy rider would have ruined the horse in a single day's
hard work among the trails of the mountain-desert, but Jacqueline,
fairly reading the mind of the black, nursed his strength when it was
needed and let him run free and swift when the ground before him was
level.

Now she picked her course dexterously down the hillside with the
cream-colored mare of Pierre following half a length behind.

After the first down-pitch of ground was covered they passed into
difficult terrain, and for half an hour went at a jog trot, winding in
and out among the rocks, climbing steadily up and up through the hills.

Here the ground opened up again, and they roved on at a free gallop,
the black always half a length in front. In all the length of the
mountain-desert there was no other picture which could compare with
these two in their youth and their pride and their fearlessness.

They rode alert, high-headed like their horses, and there was about
them a suggestion of the patience which carries a man endlessly after
one purpose, and a suggestion of the eagerness, too, which makes him
strike swift and hard and surely when the time for action comes.

Along the ridge of a crest, an almos