s kindly farmer.

"Better fall back a little, Murgie," he said. "You'd only scare 'em, you
know."

He himself passed on ahead. But it was mid-afternoon before anything
happened. Jacqueline meantime had shown some pettish ill-humor. Those
who had fought to be her escort were now singularly indifferent.
Driscoll was idly curious and quietly contemptuous, but he detected no
fright in her manner. "Fretting for her silver-braided Greaser," he said
to himself. "A pretty scrape she's got herself into, too! Now I wonder
why a girl can't have any sense." But as the answer was going to take
too long to find, he swerved back to the simpler matter of a possible
fracas.

"Well, well," he exclaimed at last, rising in his stirrups, "if there
isn't her nickel-plated hero now!"

A quarter of a mile ahead, mounted, waiting stock-still across the
trail, was Fra Diavolo. The American put away his pipe and barely moved
his spurred boot, yet the good buckskin's ears pointed forward and he
trotted ahead briskly. From old guerrilla habit, the cavalryman noted
all things as he rode. To his left the blue of the mountain line, being
nearer now, had deepened to black, and the Sierra seemed to hang over
him, ominously. But the dark summits were still without detail, and
midway down, where the solid color broke into deep green verdure and was
mottled by patches of dry slabs of rock, there was yet that massive blur
which told of distance. Foothills had rolled from the towering slide,
and mounds had tumbled from the hills, and a tide of giant pebbles had
swept down from the mounds. These rugged boulders had turned the trail,
so that the American was riding beneath a kind of cliff. To his right,
on the east of the trail, the boulders were smaller and scattered, like
a handful of great marbles flung across the cactus plain. He may have
glanced toward this side especially, at the clumps of spiny growth over
the pradera, and caught glimpses behind the strewn rocks, but his look
was casual, unstartled. He breathed deeply, though. The old familiar
elation set him vaguely quivering and tingling, with nervous, subtle
desire. The young animal's excess of life surged into a pain, almost.
Even the buckskin, knowing him, took his mood, and held high his
nostrils.

Fra Diavolo's peaked beaver, his jacket, his breeches, his high pommeled
saddle, his great box stirrups, the carabine case strapped behind, all
be-scrolled with silver, danced hazily to the magic