ing was
struggling with other hopes and fears; and the fight was rending.
Until only a few days ago he had been heading with certain and speedy
success for the day when Mira might return with head held high to the
3-bar-Y, her own ranch. Only his guilt intervened, for she had already
paid the penalty of her own rustling. It was the knowledge that she
would never return without him that made the aim such a sacred one. To
free her he must clear himself with the Police. And that could be only
when every horse with whose stealing he had been connected was returned
to its rightful owner. In his simplicity he imagined the law would be
satisfied then.

So near had been the attainment of his one great ambition that his head
sometimes whirled. Only two horses yet to recover! Then so many
things had happened.

Throughout his engagement as a common bohunk Blue Pete had been happily
unconscious of the embarrassing forces working subtly within him to
thrust to the background his own redemption. He only knew he was
uncomfortable, that strange processes were cropping to the surface in
his once firmly fixed mind. It seemed treason to Mira--Mira, for whom
everything was done--to delay a task so simple.

Yet he could not take the last two horses that alone, he imagined,
stood between him and freedom, and relieve himself of new
responsibilities.

Doubly miserable, he sank on the needle-strewn sand and sighed.

"Pete!"

Mira's gentle voice came to him through the darkness, filled with
trembling entreaty. Conscience-stricken, he hurried back to the cave.
She met him at the edge of the candle light and took his hand.

"Can't you tell me about it, Pete?"

With angry self-accusation he replied: "I cud 'a' got the horses, Mira,
an'--an' we'd 'a' bin back in the Hills long before this. Thar was
jes' a padlock to smash . . . an' I didn't smash it."

She smiled sadly and wound a small arm about his neck.

"I know," she whispered. "We can't help it. . . . There are so many
reasons why we can't go yet."

She turned swiftly away to the stove that he might not see how it tore
her. Never in his gloomiest suffering had Blue Pete longed as she had
for a home. For he had never known home as she had. Her efforts to
brighten up their days were the expression of a desire to plant in his
inexperienced mind the picture of home that kept passing before her
eyes. Her nights were but one long dream of a fireside, with Blue Pete
in