tender hand on his arm.

"I'm sorry, Pete, for your sake. Really it doesn't matter. We could
go now--"

He moved away from her, not irritably; he just could not trust himself
to refuse her anything.

"Thar's them two horses yet 'fore we got 'em all back."

"Can't we buy them? They ain't worth the trouble and risk."

He shook his head doggedly.

"Not now. They're after me--again."

There was a rending sadness about it, as if some overwhelming desire
had escaped him forever, some dreaded fear returned.

"But you can give up the job on the trestle any time you like. They
can't touch you for that, can they?"

He had told her of the incident at the trestle, and the hatred now
boiling in the breasts of the bohunks. But of the scene in Torrance's
shack, of Sergeant Mahon, he had not said a word; he felt he dare not.
That the Sergeant should be there oppressed and threatened him. Loving
Mahon with the full strength of his wild nature, he vaguely foresaw the
complications that might arise; and he wished to save Mira the worry of
it as long as he could. He had no conscious thought that Mira's early
infatuation for the Sergeant continued; he knew that he, halfbreed
though he was, had her whole heart. The Sergeant's fancy for the
prairie girl had been but the reaching out of his fine nature for the
beautiful, where so little of the beautiful existed. His marriage to
Mira's Eastern-trained cousin had spelled the end of that.

What the halfbreed dare not face was the discovery by the Police that
he whom they thought dead was alive. He was still on the Police
black-books; in spite of their affection for him, he had months of
rustling--if it was rustling--to pay for.

"Got to git them two horses--somehow," he persisted. "Then we kin
start all over agin, you 'n' me. The P'lice can't hev anythin' agin
us, when the horses are all back whar they belong."

He searched her face anxiously. So often they had talked it over, and
always neither was quite satisfied. A conflict of emotions was in her
face now; her life's dream was there, her great fear.

"They shouldn't be hard for you to get," she marvelled. "Far easier
than the camp stables."

"I lef 'em to the last. The boss is cuter'n a thousand bohunks. I
wanted to be able to git clear away 'fore he got thinkin' too
hard. . . . Las' night the stable was locked. Suthin's scared 'em."

"I don't understand why he hasn't told the Police. But I guess he knew