"I hope you may get it. Smith ought to know what's good in this country
and what isn't. When you have it you'll lead on the water and plant the
rose?"

"And plant the rose," she repeated softly.

"Don't you think," he asked, taking her hand tenderly as she walked by
his side, "that you'd better let me do the rough work for you now?"

"You are too generous, and too trusting in one unknown," she faltered.

The beat of hoofs around the sharp turn in the road where it led out
into the valley in which Meander lay, fell sharp and sudden on their
ears. There the way was close-hemmed with great boulders, among which it
turned and wound, and they scarcely had time to find a standing-place
between two riven shoulders of stone when the horseman swept around the
turn at a gallop.

He rode crouching in his saddle as if to reach forward and seize some
fleeing object of pursuit, holding his animal in such slack control that
he surely must have ridden them down if they had not given him the
entire way. His hat was blown back from his dark face, which bore a
scowl, and his lips were moving as if he muttered as he rode. Abreast of
the pair he saw them where they stood, and touched his hat in salute.

In the dust that he left behind they resumed their way. Dr. Slavens had
drawn Agnes Horton's hand through his arm; he felt that it was cold and
trembling. He looked at her, perplexity in his kind eyes.

"That's the man who stood with Peterson at the head of the line," he
said.

"Yes; Jerry Boyle," she whispered, looking behind her fearfully.
"Let's hurry on! I'm afraid," she added with the ineffectiveness of
dissimulation, "that I've kept you from your sleep too long. Together
with your awful experience and that long ride, you must be shattered for
the want of rest."

"Yet I could stand up under a good deal more," he rejoined, his thoughts
trailing Jerry Boyle up the shadowy gorge. "But I was asking you, before
that fellow broke in----"

She raised her hand appealingly.

"Don't, please. Please--not now!"

CHAPTER XIII

SENTIMENT AND NAILS

Vast changes had come over the face of that land in a few days. Every
quarter-section within reach of water for domestic uses had its tent or
its dugout in the hillside or its hastily built cabin of planks. Where
miles of unpeopled desert had stretched lonely and gray a week before,
the smoke of three thousand fires rose up each morning now, proclaiming
a new domain in the kingdom