the solitary girl a
soldier's daughter.

She could hardly have been eighteen. Her long, slim figure, in its
clinging riding habit, betrayed, despite roundness and supple grace, a
certain immaturity. Her hands and feet were long and slender. Her
sun-tanned cheek and neck were soft and rounded. Her mouth was
delicately chiseled and the lips were pink as the heart of a
Bridesmaid rose, but, being firmly closed, told no tale of the teeth
within, without a peep at which one knew not whether the beauty of the
sweet young face was really made or marred. Eyes, eyebrows, lashes,
and a wealth of tumbling tresses of rich golden brown were all superb,
but who could tell what might be the picture when she opened those
pretty, curving lips to speak or smile? Speak she did not, even to the
greyhounds stretched sprawling in the warm sands at her feet. Smile
she could not, for the young heart was sore troubled.

Back in the thick of the willows she had left her pony, blinking
lazily and switching his long tail to rid his flanks of humming
insects, but never mustering energy enough to stamp a hoof or strain
a thread of his horsehair _riata_. Both the long, lean, sprawling
hounds lolled their red, dripping tongues and panted in the sullen
heat. Even the girl herself, nervous at first and switching with her
dainty whip at the crumbling sands and pacing restlessly to and fro,
had yielded gradually to the drooping influences of the hour and,
seated on a rock, had buried her chin in the palm of her hand, and,
with eyes no longer vagrant and searching, had drifted away into
maiden dreamland. Full thirty minutes had she been there waiting for
something, or somebody, and it, or he, had not appeared.

Yet somebody else was there and close at hand. The shadow of the
westward heights had gradually risen to the crest of the rocky cliffs
across the stream. A soft, prolonged call of distant trumpet summoned
homeward, for the coming night, the scattered herds and herd guards of
the post, and, rising with a sigh of disappointment, the girl turned
toward her now impatient pony when her ear caught the sound of a
smothered hand-clap, and, whirling about in swift hope and surprise,
her face once more darkened at sight of an Indian girl, Apache
unquestionably, crouching in the leafy covert of the opposite willows
and pointing silently down stream. For a moment, without love or fear
in the eyes of either, the white girl and the brown gazed at each
other a