der the
Navajo blanket upon the couch, tucked it close about her shoulders, and
shut her eyes deliberately. Presently she fell asleep.

CHAPTER X

JEAN LEARNS WHAT FEAR IS LIKE

Sometime in the still part of the night which comes after midnight,
Jean woke slowly from dreaming of the old days that had been so vivid
in her mind when she went to sleep. Just at first she did not know
what it was that awakened her, though her eyes were open and fixed upon
the lighted square of the window. She knew that she was in her room at
the Lazy A, but just at first it seemed to her that she was there
because she had always been sleeping in that room. She sighed and
turned her face away from the moonlight, and closed her eyes again
contentedly.

Half dreaming she opened them again and stared up at the low ceiling.
Somewhere in the house she heard footsteps. Very slowly she wakened
enough to listen. They were footsteps,--the heavy, measured tread of
some man. They were in the room that had been her father's bedroom,
and at first they seemed perfectly natural and right; they seemed to be
her dad's footsteps, and she wondered mildly what he was doing, up at
that time of night.

The footsteps passed from there into the kitchen and stopped in the
corner where stood the old-fashioned cupboard with perforated tin
panels in the doors and at the sides, and the little drawers at the
top,--the kind that old people call a "safe." She heard a drawer
pulled out. Without giving any conscious thought to it, she knew which
drawer it was; it was the one next the wall,--the one that did not pull
out straight, and so had to be jerked out. What was her dad...?

Jean thrilled then with a tremor of fear. She had wakened fully enough
to remember. That was not her dad, out there in the kitchen. She did
not know who it was; it was some strange man prowling through the
house, hunting for something. She felt again the tremor of fear that
is the heritage of womanhood alone in the dark. She pulled the Navajo
blanket up to her ears with the instinct of the woman to hide, because
she is not strong enough to face and fight the danger that comes in the
dark. She listened to the sound of that drawer being pushed back, and
the other drawer being pulled out, and she shivered under the blanket.

Then she reached out her hand and got hold of her six-shooter which she
had laid down unthinkingly upon a chair near the couch. She wondered
if she had l