red
at him a moment in waking astonishment, her eyes just as he remembered
them when they drew him on in his perilous race after the train.

Such a flame rose in him that he felt it must make him transparent, and
lay his deepest sentiments bare before her gaze. So she looked at him a
moment, eye to eye, the anger gone out of her face, the flash of scorn
no longer glinting in the dark well of her eye. But if she recognized
him she did not speak of it. Almost at once she turned away, as from the
face of a stranger, looking back over the way that she had ridden in
such headlong flight.

He believed she was ashamed to have him know she recognized him. It was
not for him to speak of the straining little act that romance had cast
them for at their first meeting. Perhaps under happier circumstances
she would have recalled it, and smiled, and given him her hand.
Embarrassment must attend her here, no matter how well she believed
herself to be justified in her destructive raids against the fence.

"I'll have to go back the way I came," she said.

"There is no other way."

They started back in silence, riding side by side. Wonder filled the
door of his mind; he had only disconnected, fragmentary thoughts, upon
the current of which there rose continually the realization, only half
understood, that he started out to search the world for this woman, and
he had found her.

That he had discovered her in the part of a petty, spiteful lawbreaker,
dressed in an outlandish and unbecoming garb, did not trouble him. If he
was conscious of it at all, indeed, the hurrying turmoil of his thoughts
pushed it aside like drifted leaves by the way. The wonderful thing was
that he had found her, and at the end of a pursuit so hot it might have
been a continuation of his first race for the trophy of white linen in
her hand.

Presently this fog cleared; he came back to the starting-point of it, to
the coldness of his disappointment. More than once in that chase across
the pasture his hand had dropped to his pistol in the sober intention of
shooting the fugitive, despised as one lower than a thief. She seemed to
sound his troubled thoughts, riding there by his side like a friend.

"It was our range, and they fenced it!" she said, with all the feeling
of a feudist.

"I understand that Philbrook bought the land; he had a right to fence
it."

"He didn't have any right to buy it; they didn't have any right to sell
it to him! This was our range