nged to him, no
longer the wild, free rider of the mountain-desert, but a defenseless,
strangely weak being. Her strength was now something other than the
skill to ride hard and shoot straight and quick.

Greatest wonder of all, she accepted the new relation tacitly, and
leaned more and more weight on his hand, and even looked up and laughed
with pleasure when he almost lifted her over a muddy runlet. It was
all new, very strange, and, oddly enough, not unpleasant. Each was
viewing the other from such an altered point that neither spoke.

So they came to the schoolhouse in this silence, and reached the long
line of buggies, buckboards, and, most of all, saddled horses. They
flooded the horse-shed where the school children stabled their mounts
in the winter weather. They were tethered to the posts of the fence;
they were grouped about the trees.

It was a prodigious gathering, and a great affair for the
mountain-desert. They knew this even before they had set foot within
the building.

They stopped here and adjusted their masks carefully. They were made
from a strip of black lining which Jack had torn from one of the coats
in the trunk which lay far back in the hills.

Those masks had to be tied firmly and well, for some jester might try
to pull away that of Pierre, and if his face were seen, it would be
death--a slaughter without defense, for he had not been able to conceal
his big Colt in these tight-fitting clothes. Even as it was, there was
peril from the moment that the lights within should shine on that head
of dark-red hair.

As for Jack, there was little fear that she would be recognized. She
was strange even to Pierre every time he looked down at her, for she
had ceased to be Jack and had become very definitely "Jacqueline." But
the masks were on; the scarf adjusted about the throat and bare,
shivering shoulders of Jack, and they stood arm in arm before the door
out of which streamed the voices and the music.

"Are you ready?"

"Yes."

"Pierre--if they should find us out--"

"Never in a thousand years. Are you ready?"

"Yes."

But she was trembling so, either from fear, or excitement, or both,
that he had to take a firm hold on her arm and almost carry her up the
steps, shove the door open, and force her in.

A hundred eyes were instantly upon them, practised, suspicious eyes,
accustomed to search into all things and take nothing for granted; eyes
of men who, when a rap came at their