-dreams if she intended to
forestall the hunters at the place of nooning. She followed a game trail
that lay along the stream, ascending through the dense growths till she
reached the top of the jutting rocks. Her hair was loosened, her skirt
awry, and the pine-needles stood out from it as from a cushion. Much of
the way she gained by creeping beneath the low branches on her hands and
knees. No white woman would be likely to follow her reasoned the daughter
of the plains. It would be a little too hard on her appearance. And here,
by lying flat and hanging over the jutting knob of rock, with a pine
branch in her hand, she could see this mysterious woman and Peter and the
hunters.

She broke a branch to shade her face, she looked down on the grassy level.
She waited, but there was no sound of hoofs falling muffled on the soft
ground. The shadows of the pines contended with the splashes of sunlight
for the little world beneath the trees. They trembled in mimic battle,
then the shadows stole the sunlight, bit by bit, till all was pale-green
twilight, and there was no sound of the hunters.

The hunters, meanwhile, had not been altogether successful in the chase.
The necessary wolf had been coy, and they, perforce, had to compromise
with his poor relation, the coyote--a poor relation, indeed, whose shabby
coat, thinned by the process of summer shedding, made it an unworthy
souvenir to Miss Colebrooke. But it was not the lack of a wolf that robbed
the hunting-party of its zest for Kitty. She could not tell what it was,
but something seemed to have gone wrong with the day from the beginning.
She rode beside her cavalier in a habit the like of which the country had
never before seen, and Peter, usually the most observant of men, had no
word for its multitude of perfections. In the first realization of
disappointment with the day, the hunt, the hardships of the long ride, her
perturbed consciousness took up the problem of this missing element and
tried to adjust itself to the irritating absence. Kitty wondered if it
were something she had forgotten. No, there were her two little cambric
pocket-handkerchiefs, remotely suggestive of orris, and bearing her
monogram delicately wrought and characteristic. It was not her watch, the
ribbon fob of which fluttered now and then in the breeze. It was not veil
nor scarf-pin nor any of the paraphernalia of the properly garbed
horsewoman. And yet there was something missing, something she