the
blacker hills ahead, and never a mark of a trail to follow anywhere.

She had rounded the cavalry troop and left it far behind; the silence
which immersed the sleeping land told her this. No hoof but her own
mount's beat the earth within sound, no foot but hers strained
saddle-leather within reach of her now, she believed.

There was only one thing to do; ride slowly in the direction that she
had been holding with Banjo, and keep eyes, ears, and nose all on the
watch. The ways of the range were early; if there was anybody within a
mile of her to windward she would smell the smoke of his fire when he
lit it, and see the wink of it, too, unless he built it low.

But it was neither the scent of fire nor the red eye of it winking on
the hill that at length gave her despairing heart a fresh handful of
hope--nothing less indeed than the aroma of boiling coffee. It had
such a feeling of comfort and welcome, of domesticity and peace in it
that she felt as if she approached a door with a friend standing ready
to take her horse.

Her horse was not insensible to the cheer that somebody was brewing
for himself in that wild place. She felt him quicken under her, and
put up his head eagerly, and go forward as if he was nearing home. She
wondered how far the smell of coffee would carry, and subsequent
experience was a revelation on that point.

She had entered the hills, tracking back that wavering scent of
coffee, which rose fresh and sudden now, and trailed away the next
moment to the mere color of a smell. Now she had it, now she lost it,
as she wound over rugged ridges and through groves of quaking-asp and
balm of Gilead trees, always mounting among the hills, her eager horse
taking the way without guidance, as keen on the scent as she.

It must have taken her an hour to run down that coffee pot. Morning
was coming among the fading stars when she mounted a long ridge, the
quick striding of her horse indicating that there was something ahead
at last, and came upon the camp fire, the coffee, and the cook, all
beside a splintered gray rock that rose as high as a house out of the
barrenness of the hill.

The coffee-maker was a woman, and her pot was of several gallons'
capacity. She was standing with the cover of the boiler in one hand, a
great spoon in the other, her back half bent over her beverage, in the
position that the sound of Frances' coming had struck her. She did not
move out of that alert pose of suspicion unt