hand, and therefore
could not refasten it. And when she shut her eyes she felt those
loosened strands playing against his cheeks.

In the keener press of such sensations she caught the smell of dust and
a faint, wild, sweet tang on the air. There was a low, rustling sigh of
wind in the brush along the trail. Suddenly the silence ripped apart to
the sharp bark of a coyote, and then, from far away, came a long wail.
And then Majesty's metal-rimmed hoof rang on a stone.

These later things lent probability to that ride for Madeline. Otherwise
it would have seemed like a dream. Even so it was hard to believe. Again
she wondered if this woman who had begun to think and feel so much was
Madeline Hammond. Nothing had ever happened to her. And here, playing
about her like her hair played about Stewart's face, was adventure,
perhaps death, and surely life. She could not believe the evidence of
the day's happenings. Would any of her people, her friends, ever believe
it? Could she tell it? How impossible to think that a cunning Mexican
might have used her to further the interests of a forlorn revolution.
She remembered the ghoulish visages of those starved rebels, and
marveled at her blessed fortune in escaping them. She was safe, and now
self-preservation had some meaning for her. Stewart's arrival in the
glade, the courage with which he had faced the outlawed men, grew
as real to her now as the iron arm that clasped her. Had it been an
instinct which had importuned her to save this man when he lay ill and
hopeless in the shack at Chiricahua? In helping him had she hedged round
her forces that had just operated to save her life, or if not that, more
than life was to her? She believed so.

Madeline opened her eyes after a while and found that night had fallen.
The sky was a dark, velvety blue blazing with white stars. The cool
wind tugged at her hair, and through waving strands she saw Stewart's
profile, bold and sharp against the sky.

Then, as her mind succumbed to her bodily fatigue, again her situation
became unreal and wild. A heavy languor, like a blanket, began to steal
upon her. She wavered and drifted. With the last half-conscious sense
of a muffled throb at her ear, a something intangibly sweet, deep-toned,
and strange, like a distant calling bell, she fell asleep with her head
on Stewart's breast.

XII. Friends from the East

Three days after her return to the ranch Madeline could not discover any
physical