lted from the waist down. She was deadly faint and cold and
shaking, and all in a second, in the fraction of a second, before she
had risen from her stooping posture.

Oh, why wasn't it Virginia instead? Virginia had always had such heroic
plans of making the man come out of his hiding-place at the point of her
pistol; and Virginia could cock a pistol and wasn't covered with cold
shivers at the sight of one, as she was. If it had only been Francie,
whose shrill voice could have been heard over the side of the earth, or
Juliet, whose long legs would have left burglar, and house, too, in the
background between the opening and slamming of a door. Either of them
was so much more fit than she, the chicken-hearted one of the family, to
cope with this creature. And they were all gone to the wedding with
Fred, and would not be at home till to-morrow; and Tom had just returned
from the town and handed her his roll of bills, and told her to take
care of it till he came back from galloping down to the works with
Jules; and she had tucked it into her belt, and had asked him, a little
quakingly, what if any of the men of the Dead Line that they had heard
of or Red Dan or an Apache came along; and he had laughed, and said she
had better ask them in and reproach them for making such strangers of
themselves as not to have called in the two years she had been in this
part of the country; and she had the two maids with her, and he should
be back directly. And she had looked out after him a moment over the
wide prairie to the hills, all bathed in moonlight, and felt as if she
were a spirit alone in a dead world. And here she was now, the two maids
away in the little wing, locked out by the main house, alone with a
burglar, and not another being nearer than the works, a half-mile off.

How did this man know that she was without any help here? How did he
know that Tom was coming back with the money to pay the men that night?
How did he happen to be aware that Tom's money was all in the house?
Evidently he was one of the men. No one else could have known anything
about it. If that money was taken, nobody would believe the story; Tom
would be cashiered; he never could live through the disgrace; he would
die of a broken heart, and she of another. They had come out to this
remote and lonesome country to build up a home and a fortune; and so
many people would be stricken with them! What a mischance for her to be
left with the whole thing in her