ad been Helen Messiter's daily custom either to take a ride on her
pony or a spin in her motor car, but since Bannister had been quartered
at the Lazy D her time had been so fully occupied that she had given
this up for the present. The arrival of Nora Darling, however, took so
much work off her hands that she began to continue her rides and drives.

Her patient was by this time so far recovered that he did not need her
constant attendance and there were reasons why she decided it best to
spend only a minimum of her time with him. These had to do with her
increasing interest in the man and the need she felt to discourage it.
It had come to a pretty pass, she told herself scornfully, when she
found herself inventing excuses to take her into the room where this
most picturesque of unhanged scamps was lying. Most good women are at
heart puritans, and if Helen was too liberal to judge others narrowly
she could be none the less rigid with herself. She might talk to him of
her duty, but it was her habit to be frank in thought and she knew that
something nearer than that abstraction had moved her efforts in his
behalf. She had fought for his life because she loved him. She could
deny it no longer. Nor was the shame with which she confessed it
unmingled with pride. He was a man to compel love, one of the mood
imperative, chain-armored in the outdoor virtues of strength and
endurance and stark courage. Her abasement began only where his
superlation ended. That a being so godlike in equipment should have been
fashioned without a soul, and that she should have given her heart to
him. This was the fount of her degradation.

It was of these things she thought as she drove in the late afternoon
toward those Antelope Peaks he had first pointed out to her. She swept
past the scene of the battle and dipped down into the plains for a run
to that western horizon behind the jagged mountain line of which the sun
was radiantly setting in a splash of glorious colors. Lost in thought,
space slipped under her wheels unnoticed. Not till her car refused the
spur and slowed to a despondent halt did she observe that velvet night
was falling over the land.

She prowled round the machine after the fashion of the motorist,
examining details that might be the cause of the trouble. She discovered
soon enough with instant dismay that the gasolene tank was empty. Reddy,
always unreliable, must have forgotten to fill it when she told him to.

By the roa