on
for the drained water tank.

Hiram did not hear her, for the wagons were rumbling, thirty-two sets
of big hoofs were sloshing in mud, the bells a-jingle, the rain a roar.

Jo wore a yellow oilskin slicker and a sou'wester of the same material,
and rubber knee boots. Only her pretty face, smiling from the
concealing garments, showed that she was a woman.

The animals that trailed behind Hiram's wagon went out of sight around
the first curve. The last of these mules were not a hundred feet ahead
of the noses of Jo's white leaders. As her leaders reached the curve
Jo called shrilly to her off-pointer to cross the chain and pull the
wagon away from the rock wall on the right-hand side. Obediently the
mare stepped over the chain, and she and her mate began pulling the
pole at an angle of forty-five degrees from the direction in which the
leaders and swings were traveling. The wagon and its trailer made the
sharp curve, and the mare was stepping back into place at Jo's command,
when suddenly the girl's breathing was shut off, and she was whipped
from her feet as if a cyclone had struck her.

Several pairs of arms were about her; a heavy cloth was over her mouth
and nose and eyes. Fighting frantically against she knew not what, she
was borne rapidly toward the tail-end of the wagon. Some one's arms
were about her middle; another pair circled her shoulders; still
another held her booted legs at the knees.

She tried to scream, but only a vague b-b-r-r sounded through the cloth
that covered her face. She kicked and clawed and twisted and jerked
and squirmed with surprising suddenness. Nevertheless, a rope was
bound about her slicker, round and round from her shoulders to her
ankles, swathing her like the bandages of a mummy, until she was almost
as stiff as one. She heard the roar of the rain, but no sound of her
moving team. She was whipped from the ground as if she weighed no more
than ten pounds; and in a horizontal position the three pairs of arms
bore her along rapidly in the direction that she had come, much as if
she were a roll of canvas bound about with marline hitches.

Presently she felt herself ascending; then wet foliage brushed her
face. Not a word had been spoken--almost she had heard not a sound,
because of the noise of the rain and the slushy hoofbeats and the
bells. Whoever her captors were, they had lain in wait until the elbow
of the curve separated Hiram's outfit and hers, and then had