rmination to struggle against capture to the end, and her blue eyes
were blazing with excitement. Kate was on her knees with her arms held
out.

"Joan, dear, have you forgotten munner?"

The wildness flickered away from the eyes of the child little by little.

"Munner?" she repeated dubiously.

No shout of welcome, no sudden rush, no arms to fling about her mother.
But if her throat was dry and closed Kate allowed no sign of it to creep
into her voice.

"Where's Daddy Dan?"

"He's gone away."

"Where?"

"Oh--over there!"

The mother rose slowly to her feet, and looked out across the mountains
as if in search of aid. For her mind had harked back to that story her
father used to tell of the coming of Dan Barry; how he had ridden across
the hills one evening and saw, walking against the sunset, a tattered
boy who whistled strangely as he went, and when old Joe Cumberland asked
where he was going he had only waved a vague hand toward the north and
answered, "Oh--over there. It was sufficient destination for him, it
was sufficient explanation now for the child. She remembered how she,
herself a child then, had sat at her father's table and watched the
brown face of the strange boy with fascination, and the wild, quick eyes
which went everywhere and rested in no one place. They were the eyes
which looked up to her now from Joan's face, and she felt suddenly
divorced from her baby, as if all the blood in Joan were the blood of
her father.

"He left you here alone?" she murmured.

The child looked at her with a sort of curious amazement.

"Joan isn't alone."

She whistled softly, and around the corner of the rock peered two tiny,
beady-bright eyes, and the sharp nose of a coyote puppy. It disappeared
at once at the sight of the stranger, and now all the strength went from
Kate. She slipped helplessly down, and sat on a boulder trying to think,
trying to master the panic which chilled her; for she thought of the
day when Whistling Dan brought home to the Cumberland Ranch the wounded
wolf-dog, Black Bart. But the call of Joan had traveled far, and now a
squirrel came in at a gallop with his vast tail bobbing behind him, and
ran right up the rock until he was on the shoulder of the child. From
this point of vantage, however, he saw Kate, and was instantly on the
floor of the cave and scurrying for the entrance, chattering with rage.

The wild things came to Joan as they came to her father, and the eyes of
the ch