r, entered the front door again,
walked quietly to the door of the inner room, glanced in, saw that her
husband was absorbed in splicing a riata, and had evidently not missed
her, and returned quietly to her dish-washing. With this singular
difference: a few moments before she had seemed inattentive and careless
of what she was doing, as if from some abstraction; now, when she
was actually abstracted, her movements were mechanically perfect and
deliberate. She carefully held up a dish and examined it minutely for
cracks, rubbing it cautiously with the towel, but seeing all the while
only the man she had left in the barn. A few moments elapsed. Then there
came another rush of wind around the house, a drifting cloud of dust
before the door, the clatter of hoofs, and a quick shout.

Her husband reached the door, from the inner room, almost as quickly as
she did. They both saw in the road two armed mounted men--one of whom
Ira recognized as the sheriff's deputy.

"Has anybody been here, just now?" he asked sharply.

"No."

"Seen anybody go by?" he continued.

"No. What's up?"

"One of them circus jumpers stabbed Hal Dudley over the table in Dolores
monte shop last night, and got away this morning. We hunted him into the
plain and lost him somewhere in this d----d dust."

"Why, Sue reckoned she saw suthin' just now," said Ira, with a flash of
recollection. "Didn't ye, Sue?"

"Why the h-ll didn't she say it before?--I beg your pardon, ma'am;
didn't see you; you'll excuse haste."

Both the men's hats were in their hands, embarrassed yet gratified
smiles on their faces, as Sue came forward. There was the faintest of
color in her sallow cheek, a keen brilliancy in her eyes; she looked
singularly pretty. Even Ira felt a slight antenuptial stirring through
his monotonously wedded years.

The young woman walked out, folding the towel around her red hands and
forearms--leaving the rounded whiteness of bared elbow and upper arm
in charming contrast--and looked gravely past the admiring figures that
nearly touched her own. "It was somewhar over thar," she said lazily,
pointing up the road in the opposite direction to the barn, "but I ain't
sure it WAS any one."

"Then he'd already PASSED the house afore you saw him?" said the deputy.

"I reckon--if it WAS him," returned Sue.

"He must have got on," said the deputy; "but then he runs like a deer;
it's his trade."

"Wot trade?"

"Acrobat."

"Wot's that?"

The two