that night he had set
himself to discover the secret of its location, had listened at windows
and at keyholes, and had once intercepted a letter from one to the
other. By chance he had discovered that the baby was carrying the secret
in her locket, and he had set himself to get it from her.

But his chance did not come. He could not make friends with her, and at
last, in despair of finding a better opportunity, he had slipped into
her room one night in the small hours to steal the chain. But it was
wound round her neck in such a way that he could not slip it over her
head. She had awakened while he was fumbling with the clasp and had
begun to cry. Hearing her mother moving about in the next room, he had
hastily carried the child with him, mounted the horse waiting in the
yard, and ridden away.

In the road he became aware, some time later, that he was being pursued.
This gave him a dreadful fright, for, as Bucky had surmised, he thought
his pursuer was Mackenzie. All night he rode southward wildly, but still
his follower kept on his trail till near morning, when he eluded him. He
crossed the border, but late that afternoon got another fright. For it
was plain he was still being followed. In the endless stretch of rolling
hills he twice caught sight of a rider picking his way toward him. The
heart of the guilty man was like water. He could not face the outraged
father, nor was it possible to escape so dogged a foe by flight. An
alternative suggested itself, and he accepted it with sinking courage.
The child was asleep in his arms now, and he hastily dismounted,
picketed his horse, and stole back a quarter of a mile, so that the
neighing of his bronco might not betray his presence. Then he lay down
in a dense mesquit thicket and waited for his foe. It seemed an eternity
till the man appeared at the top of a rise fifty yards away. Hastily
Anderson fired, and again. The man toppled from his horse, dead before
he struck the ground. But when the cook reached him he was horrified to
see that the man he had killed was a member of the Rurales, or Mexican
border police. In his guilty terror he had shot the wrong man.

He fled at once, pursued by a thousand fears. Late the next night he
reached a Chihuahua village, after having been lost for many hours. The
child he still carried with him, simply because he had not the heart
to leave it to die in the desert alone. A few weeks later he married
an American woman he met in Sonora.