was
white. Her thin, white hands rested limply on the arms of the chair,
and she was rocking back and forth, back and forth, steadily,
quietly,--just rocking and staring at the Indian rug.

Casey has since told me that she was the creepiest thing he ever saw in
his life. Yet he could not explain why it was so. The woman's face was
not so old, though it was lined and without color. There was a
terrible quiet in her features, but he felt, somehow, that her thoughts
were not quiet. It was as if her thoughts were reaching out to him,
telling him things too awful for her thin, hushed lips to let pass.

But after all, Casey's main object was to locate the man with the
rifle, and to do it before he himself was seen on the butte. He
watched a little longer the woman who rocked and rocked. Never once did
her eyes move from that fixed point on the rug. Never once did her
fingers move on the arm of the chair. Her mouth remained immobile as
the lips of a dead woman. He had to force himself to leave the window;
and when he did, he felt guilty, as if he had somehow deserted some one
helpless and needing him. He sneaked back, lifted himself and took
another long look. The old woman was rocking back and forth, her face
quiet with that terrible, pent placidity which Casey could not
understand.

Away from the cabin a pebble's throw, he shook his shoulders and pulled
his mind away from her, back to the man with the rifle--and to Barney.
Rocking in a chair never hurt anybody that he ever heard of. And
shooting from rim-rocks did. And Barney was down there, holed up and
helpless, though he had grub and water. Casey was up here in a mighty
dangerous place without much grub or water but--he hoped--not quite
helpless. His immediate, pressing job was not to peek through a
high-up window at an old woman rocking back and forth in a chair, but
to round up the man who was interfering with Casey's peaceful quest
for--well, he called it wealth; but I think that adventure meant more
to him.

He picked his way carefully along the edge of the rim-rock, keeping
under cover when he could and watching always the country ahead. And
without any artful description of his progress, I will simply say that
Casey Ryan combed the edge of that rampart for two miles before dark,
and found himself at last on the side farthest from Barney without
having discovered the faintest trace of any living soul save the woman
who rocked back and forth in the