y Jove, you must despise me, Mary!"

"I don't try to understand you Westerners," she answered, "and that's
why I have never questioned you before. Tell me, why is it that you
come so stealthily to see me and run away as soon as any one else
appears?"

He said with wonder: "Haven't you guessed?"

"I don't dare guess."

"But you have, and your guess was right. There's a price on my head.
By right, I should be out there on the ranges with Pierre le Rouge and
McGurk. There's the only safe place; but I saw you and I came down out
of the wilds and can't go back. I'll stay, I suppose, till I run my
head into a halter."

She was too much moved to speak for a moment, and then: "You come to me
in spite of that? Dick, whatever you have done, I know that it's only
chance which made you go wrong, just as it made Pierre. I wish--"

The dimness of her eyes encouraged him with a great hope. He stole
closer to her.

He repeated: "You wish--"

"That you could be satisfied with a mere friendship. I could give you
that, Dick, with all my heart."

He stepped back and smiled somewhat grimly on her.

She went on: "And this McGurk--what do you mean when you say that
Pierre is on his trail?"

"Hunting him with a gun."

She grew paler and trembled, but her voice remained steady. It was
always that way; at the very moment when he expected her to quail, some
inner strength bore her up and baffled him.

"But in all those miles of mountains they may never meet?"

"They can't stay apart any more than iron can stay away from a magnet.
Listen: half a dozen years ago McGurk had the reputation of bearing a
charmed life. He had been in a hundred fights and he was never touched
with either a knife or a bullet. Then he crossed Pierre le Rouge when
Pierre was only a youngster just come onto the range. He put two
bullets through Pierre, but the boy shot him from the floor and wounded
him for the first time. The charm of McGurk was broken.

"For half a dozen years McGurk was gone; there was never a whisper
about him. Then he came back and went on the trail of Pierre. He has
killed the friends of Pierre one by one; Pierre himself is the next in
order--Pierre or myself. And when those two meet there will be the
greatest fight that was ever staged in the mountain-desert."

She stood straight, staring past Wilbur with hungry eyes.

"I knew he needed me. I have to save him, Dick. You see that? I have
to bring him down from t