ly averse to Blakely, laid
the story before her brother the very day he started on the warpath,
and Janet was startled to see that she was telling him no news
whatever. "Then, indeed," said she, "it is high time the major took
his wife away," and Wren sternly bade her hold her peace, she knew not
what she was saying! But, said Camp Sandy, who could it have been but
Mrs. Plume or, possibly, Elise? Once or twice in its checkered past
Camp Sandy had had its romance, its mystery, indeed its scandals, but
this was something that put in the shade all previous episodes; this
shook Sandy to its very foundation, and this, despite her brother's
prohibition, Janet Wren felt it her duty to detail in full to Angela.

To do her justice, it should be said that Miss Wren had striven
valiantly against the impulse,--had indeed mastered it for several
hours,--but the sight of the vivid blush, the eager joy in the sweet
young face when Blakely's new "striker" handed in a note addressed to
Miss Angela Wren, proved far too potent a factor in the undoing of
that magnanimous resolve. The girl fled with her prize, instanter, to
her room, and thither, as she did not reappear, the aunt betook
herself within the hour. The note itself was neither long nor
effusive--merely a bright, cordial, friendly missive, protesting
against the idea that any apology had been due. There was but one line
which could be considered even mildly significant. "The little net,"
wrote Blakely, "has now a value that it never had before." Yet Angela
was snuggling that otherwise unimportant billet to her cheek when the
creaking stairway told her portentously of a solemn coming. Ten
minutes more and the note was lying neglected on the bureau, and
Angela stood at her window, gazing out over dreary miles of almost
desert landscape, of rock and shale and sand and cactus, with eyes
from which the light had fled, and a new, strange trouble biting at
her girlish heart. Confound No. 4--and Norah Shaughnessy!

It had been arranged that when the Plumes were ready to start, Mrs.
Daly and her daughter, the newly widowed and the fatherless, should be
sent up to Prescott and thence across the desert to Ehrenberg, on the
Colorado. While no hostile Apaches had been seen west of the Verde
Valley, there were traces that told that they were watching the road
as far at least as the Agua Fria, and a sergeant and six men had been
chosen to go as escort to the little convoy. It had been supposed