ared not own, of one flying, bent into the shadows,
along the garden path toward that gate. Someone who knew the "lay of
the land!"

"Did you hear something?" Mrs. Chadron whispered, leaning close to her
where she had stopped, stock-still, as if she had struck a wall.

"I thought I--I--saw something," Frances answered, in faint, sick
voice.

The white gate was swinging as the invaders had left it, and in the
soft ground beyond it they found tracks.

"Only one man!" said Mrs. Chadron, bending over.

"There's only one track," said Frances, her breath so feeble, her
heart laboring so weakly that she believed that she must die.

Alvino came up, and took the lead in tracking, with the aptness for
that trick that goes with primitive minds such as his. Even in the
farthest glimmer of the light he could pick up the trail, and soon he
led them to the willows where the ravisher's horse had been
concealed.

"One shoe was lost," said he, pointing, "left one, hind foot."

Mrs. Chadron stood looking in the direction that the rider had gone
with his precious burden, her eyes straining into the dark.

"Oh, if I'd 'a' come down here place of saddlin' that horse!" she
lamented, with a pang for her lost opportunity.

"He'd have been gone, even then--I was past here and didn't hear him,"
Frances said.

Still the vision persisted in her disturbed imagination of that other
night, of one leaning low in the saddle, his fleet horse stretching
its neck in desperation for the distant refuge; the dash of pursuing
hoofs; the sound of shots up the river; the prayer that she sent to
heaven in his behalf.

"Well, it was somebody that knowed the lay of the land," Mrs. Chadron
was repeating, with accusing conviction.

They returned to the house, having done all that they could do. It was
doubtful whether the dumb, plethoric nature of Mrs. Chadron made her
capable of suffering as Frances suffered, even with her greater reason
for pain of that cruel bereavement. Imaginative, refined, sensitive as
a harp, Frances reflected every wild wrench of horror that Nola
herself must have been suffering as the horseman bore her along in the
thick night. She felt that she must scream, but that some frightful
thing smothered the voice that struggled in her throat; that she must
leap and flee away, but a cloying power was heavy on her limbs,
binding her as if her feet were set in lava.

Somebody that knew the "lay of the land." Great God! could he figh