hed the bonnet
from his head.

How she suffered in picturing his peril, happily outlived! How her
heart trembled and her strong young limbs shook as she lived over in
breathless agony the crisis of that night! He had carried her glove in
his bonnet--she remembered the deft little movement of stowing it
there just the moment before he bent and flashed away among the
shadows. Excuse enough for losing it, indeed!

But he had not told her of his escape to justify the loss; proudly he
had accepted the blame, and turned away with the hurt of it in his
unbending heart.

She went back and took down the jaunty little cap again, and kissed it
with compensatory tenderness, and left a jewel trembling on its crown
from the well of her honest brown eye. If ever amends were made to any
little highland bonnet in this world, then Alan Macdonald's was that
bonnet, hanging there among the flaring pennants and trivial little
schoolgirl trophies on Nola Chadron's wall.

Chadron came home toward evening at the head of sixty men. He had
raised his army speedily and effectively. These men had been gathered
by the members of the Drovers' Association and sent to Meander by
special train, horses, guns, ammunition, and provisions with them,
ready for a campaign.

The cattlemen had made a common cause of this sectional difficulty.
Their indignation had been voiced very thoroughly by Mrs. Chadron when
she had spoken to Frances with such resentment of the homesteaders
standing up to fight. That was an unprecedented contingency. The "holy
scare," such as Mark Thorn and similar hired assassins spread in
communities of homesteaders, had been sufficient up to that day. Now
this organized front of self-defense must be broken, and the bold
rascals involved must be destroyed, root and branch.

Press agents of the Drovers' Association in Cheyenne were sowing
nation-wide picturesque stories of the rustlers' uprising. The ground
was being prepared for the graver news that was to come; the
cattlemen's justification was being carefully arranged in advance.

Frances shuddered for the homesteaders when she looked out of her
window upon this formidable force of lean-legged, gaunt-cheeked
gun-fighters. They were men of the trade, cowboys who had fought their
employers' battles from the Rio Grande to the Little Missouri. They
were grim and silent men as they pressed round the watering troughs at
the windmill with their horses, with flapping hats and low-slun