laid his hand
that morning on the bridle of the mules; it would have been easy then.
Sinclair might have been thinking of it even as he stood looking back.
But he stood only for a moment, then turned and passed over the hill.

CHAPTER III

DICKSIE

The wreckers, drifting in the blaze of the sun across the broad alkali
valley, saw the smoke of the wreck-fire behind them. No breath of wind
stirred it. With the stillness of a signal column it rose, thin and
black, and high in the air spread motionless, like a huge umbrella,
above Smoky Creek. Reed Young had gone with an engine to wire
reenforcements, and McCloud, active among the trackmen until the
conflagration spent itself, had retired to the shade of the hill.

Reclining against a rock with his legs crossed, he had clasped his
hands behind his head and sat looking at the iron writhing in the
dying heat of the fire. The sound of hoofs aroused him, and looking
below he saw a horsewoman reining up near his men at the wreck. She
rode an American horse, thin and rangy, and the experienced way in
which she checked him drew him back almost to his haunches. But
McCloud's eyes were fixed on the slender figure of the rider. He was
wholly at a loss to account, at such a time and in such a place, for
a visitor in gauntleted gloves and a banded Panama hat. He studied her
with growing amazement. Her hair coiled low on her neck supported the
very free roll of the hat-brim. Her black riding-skirt clung to her
waist to form its own girdle, and her white stock, rolled high on her
neck, rose above a heavy shirtwaist of white linen, and gave her an
air of confident erectness. The trackmen stopped work to look, but her
attitude in their gaze was one of impatience rather than of
embarrassment. Her boot flashed in the stirrup while she spoke to the
nearest man, and her horse stretched his neck and nosed the brown
alkali-grass that spread thinly along the road.

To McCloud she was something like an apparition. He sat spellbound
until the trackman indiscreetly pointed him out, and the eyes of the
visitor, turning his way, caught him with his hands on the rock in an
attitude openly curious. She turned immediately away, but McCloud rose
and started down the hill. The horse's head was pulled up, and there
were signs of departure. He quickened his steps. Once he saw, or
thought he saw, the rider's head so turned that her eyes might have
commanded one approaching from his quarter; yet