life than face the look that will come in her
eyes."

"I know it, Dick."

"But this is final?"

"It is."

"Then good-bye again, and--God bless you, Pierre."

"And you, old fellow."

They swerved their horses in opposite directions and galloped apart.

"It was nothing," said Pierre to Jack, when he came up with her and
drew his horse down to a trot. But he knew that she had read his mind,
and for an hour they could not look each other in the face.

But all day through the mazes of canon and hill and rolling ground they
searched patiently. There was no cranny in the rocks too small for
them to reconnoiter with caution. There was no group of trees they did
not examine.

Yet it was not strange that they failed. In the space of every square
mile there were a hundred hiding-places which might have served McGurk.
It would have taken a month to comb the country. They had only a day,
and left the result to chance, but chance failed them. When the
shadows commenced to swing across the gullies they turned back and rode
with downward heads, silent.

One hill lay between them and the old ranch-house which had been the
headquarters for their gang so many days, when they saw a faint drift
of smoke across the sky--not a thin column of smoke such as rises from
a chimney, but a broad stream of pale mist, as if a dozen chimneys were
spouting wood-smoke at once.

They exchanged glances and spurred their horses up the last slope. As
always in a short spurt, the long-legged black of Jacqueline
out-distanced the cream-colored mare, and it was she who first topped
the rise of land. The girl whirled in her saddle with raised arm,
screamed back at Pierre, and rode on at a still more furious pace.

What he saw when he reached a corresponding position was the
ranch-house wreathed in smoke, and through all the lower windows was
the red dance of flames. Before him fled Jacqueline with all the speed
of the black. He loosened the reins, spoke to the mare, and she
responded with a mighty rush. Even that tearing pace could not quite
take him up to the girl, but he flung himself from the saddle and was
at her side when she ran across the smoking veranda and wrenched at the
front door.

The whole frame gave back at her, and as Pierre snatched her to one
side the doorway fell crashing on the porch, while a mighty volume of
smoke burst out at them like a puff from the pit.

They stood sputtering, coughing, and choking, and when