she came to the branching of the roads she pulled up her horse
and sat considering her course a little while. Presently she rode
forward again, but not on the road that led to the army post.

She had proceeded a mile, perhaps, along the road branching to the
homesteaders' settlement, upon which she knew Macdonald's claim to lie
somewhere up the river, when she rounded an elbow screened by
tall-growing greasewood and came face to face with a small cavalcade
of dusty men. At the head of them Alan Macdonald rode, beside an old
man whose neck was guttered like a wasted candle and his branching
great mustache gray as the dust on his bony shoulders.

She halted when she saw them, and they jerked up their horses also,
with startled suddenness, like men riding in the expectation of danger
and surprise. Macdonald came forward in a moment, with respectful
salute, a look amounting almost to frightened questioning in his face.
For the sun was not up yet, although its flame was on the heavens, and
it was a strange, wild place to meet a woman of Frances Landcraft's
caste unattended, and with the shadow of a trouble in her face that
made it old, like misery.

But there was no question of the unfriendliness of that face for Alan
Macdonald and the men who came riding at his back. It was as cold as
the gray earth beneath her horse's hoofs, and its severity was
reflected in the very pose of her body, even in the grip of her
slender thighs as they clasped her saddle, sitting there like a
dragoon outrider who had appeared to bar their way.

Frances was wearing the brown corduroy riding-habit that she had worn
on the day when she first spoke to him. Her brown hair had fallen down
until it hid her ears, for she had ridden hard, and a strand of it
blew from beneath her cowboy hat in unheeded caress across her cheek.

Macdonald saw her stiffen in the saddle and lift herself a little from
her seat as he drew near, his companions stopping a little distance
back. Her eyes were stern and reproachful; a little frown troubled her
white forehead.

"I was starting out to find you, Mr. Macdonald," she said, severely.

"If there is any service, Miss Landcraft--"

"Don't talk emptiness, and don't pretend!" she said, a flash of anger
in her face. "It isn't a man's way to fight, it's a coward's! Bring
her back home!"

"I don't know what you mean." There was such an astonished helplessness
in his manner that it would have convinced any unprejudiced