the other chair. And as the time of their penance seemed to be
nearing an end the ugly ranch-house at the 3-bar-Y became to her a
palace. Over and over again she planned the fresh home they would
start--every chair and table and picture and rug had a place. Helen
Mahon, the Sergeant's wife--her own educated cousin--would help her,
would supply the art Mira herself, in her prairie upbringing, only
groped for. She would make of the 3-bar-Y a home for the whole Cypress
Hills district. Every day of delay was agony.

Yet she spoke cheerfully. "It wouldn't be just--just right to go till
the trestle's done, Pete, dear."

He looked at her sharply. It was the conviction he had been fighting
many a day--that it seemed to be only his own had made it so much
harder for him. From the silence he had forced on himself of late he
spoke fiercely:

"That damned Pole! We can't let him win. We got to lick them bohunks."

"And Mr. Torrance--after all, Pete, he's only a tenderfoot. . . . Then
there's Tressa."

He nodded slowly. "Yes, there's Tressa." A chivalry he would never
have acknowledged had been thrusting the girl more and more into the
foreground. From the ordinary perils of isolation father and lover
might defend her, but in the great calamity that Blue Pete knew was
planned to overwhelm her two protectors she would inevitably fall.

"But yuh shudn't have to wait, Mira," he burst out. "An yuh wudn't,"
he added miserably, "if I wasn't jes' a common rustler."

She came to him with quick steps and ran her fingers through his coarse
hair.

"I wasn't no better, Pete--me and my brothers." In her emotion she had
dropped back into the old looseness of speech.

He seized her hand in both his own and crushed it to his lips so that
it hurt pleasurably.

"I know why yuh stole them horses," he murmured. "Yuh cudn't bear to
see the Sergeant thinkin' he loved yuh--an' yuh knew he cudn't love a
rustler."

"I guess I knew I was going to love you, Pete."

He wrapped his arms about her and buried his face in her neck; and she
could feel him trembling.

Presently she spoke again softly:

"And there's the Sergeant."

"God help me!" he groaned. "I think that's what's holdin' me."

From the moment of his leap through Torrance's window the half breed's
mind had been disquieted. At any risk, until he could go to them with
clean hands, he would not let the Police know he was still alive. He
knew their relentlessness i