ather to me, and I love him."

"I think I love him, too," replied Hare, simply.

With an effort he left her at last and mounted the grassy slope and
climbed high up among the tottering yellow crags; and there he battled
with himself. Whatever the charm of Mescal's surrender, and the
insistence of his love, stern hammer-strokes of fairness, duty, honor,
beat into his brain his debt to the man who had saved him. It was a
long-drawn-out battle not to be won merely by saying right was right.
He loved Mescal, she loved him; and something born in him with his new
health, with the breath of this sage and juniper forest, with the
sight of purple canyons and silent beckoning desert, made him fiercely
tenacious of all that life had come to mean for him. He could not give
her up--and yet--

Twilight forced Hare from his lofty retreat, and he trod his way
campward, weary and jaded, but victorious over himself. He thought he
had renounced his hope of Mescal; he returned with a resolve to be true
to August, and to himself; bitterness he would not allow himself to
feel. And yet he feared the rising in him of a new spirit akin to that
of the desert itself, intractable and free.

"Well, Jack, we rode down the last of Silvermane's band," said August,
at supper. "The Navajos came up and helped us out. To-morrow you'll see
some fun, when we start to break Silvermane. As soon as that's done I'll
go, leaving the Indians to bring the horses down when they're broken."

"Are you going to leave Silvermane with me?" asked Jack.

"Surely. Why, in three days, if I don't lose my guess, he'll be like
a lamb. Those desert stallions can be made into the finest kind of
saddle-horses. I've seen one or two. I want you to stay up here with the
sheep. You're getting well, you'll soon be a strapping big fellow.
Then when we drive the sheep down in the fall you can begin life on the
cattle ranges, driving wild steers. There's where you'll grow lean and
hard, like an iron bar. You'll need that horse, too, my lad."

"Why--because he's fast?" queried Jack, quickly answering to the implied
suggestion.

August nodded gloomily. "I haven't the gift of revelation, but I've come
to believe Martin Cole. Holderness is building an outpost for his
riders close to Seeping Springs. He has no water. If he tries to pipe
my water--" The pause was not a threat; it implied the Mormon's doubt
of himself. "Then Dene is on the march this way. He's driven some of
Marshall's