e was certain, at the time the
party dispersed. The chase must have led them far.

There was no way of knowing what the result of that race had been. If
he had escaped, Frances believed that he would let her know in some
way; if he had fallen, she knew that the news of his death, important
as it would be to Chadron, would fly as if it had wings. There was
nothing to do but wait, and in any event hide away that warm sweet
thing that had unfolded in beautiful florescence in her soul.

She told herself that he must have escaped, or the pursuers would have
returned long before the party from the post left the Chadron house.
He had led them a long ride in his daring way, and doubtless was
laughing at them now in his own house, among his friends. She wondered
what his surroundings were, and what his life was like on that ranch
for which he risked it. In the midst of this speculation she fell
asleep, and lay wearily in dreamless repose for many hours.

Sleep is a marvelous clarifier of the mind. It is like the saleratus
which the pioneers used to cast into their barrels of Missouri River
water, to precipitate the silt and make it clear. Frances rose out of
her sleep with readjusted reasoning; in fear, and in doubt.

She was shocked by the surrender that she had made to that unknown
man. Perhaps he was nothing more than a thief, as charged, and this
story fixing his identification had been only a fabrication. An honest
man would have had no necessity for such haste, such wild insistence
of his right to love her. It seemed, in the light of due reflection,
the rude way of an outlawed hand.

Then there came the soft pleading of something deeper to answer for
Alan Macdonald, and to justify his rash deed. He had risked life to
see her and set himself right in her eyes, and he had doubled the risk
in standing there in the garden, defiantly proud, unbent, and
unrepentant, refusing to leave her without some favor to carry away.

There was only a sigh to answer it, after all; only a hope that time
would bring her neither shame nor regret for that romantic passage in
the dusky garden path. That she had neither shame nor regret in that
hour was her sweetest consolation. More, she was comfortable in the
security that the secret of that swift interlude was her own. Honest
man or thief, Alan Macdonald was not the man to speak of that.

Frances was surprised to find that she had slept into the middle of
the afternoon. Major King had ca