is up to I don't know. I think del Rio does. When Galloway gets back
you keep your eye on the two of them."

After the county attorney's departure Rod Norton rested more easily.
He was making restitution for all that he had done, he was getting well
and strong again, he had been given such proof as comes to few men of
the utter devotion of a woman. Through many a bright hour he and
Virginia, daring to look confidently ahead, talked of life as it might
be lived upon Las Flores when the lake was made, the lower lands
irrigated, the big home built.

"And," she confessed to him at the last, her face hidden against his
breast, "I never want to see a surgeon's lancet again in all of my
life, Rod Norton!"

When at length the sheriff could bestride a horse he wondered
impatiently what it could be that kept Jim Galloway so long away. And
if he was never coming back. But he knew that high up among the
cliffs, hidden away in the ancient caves, Jim Galloway's rifles were
still lying.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE STRONG HAND OF GALLOWAY

"Oh, you will all dance and shout together very soon," said Ignacio
wisely to his six bells in the old Mission garden. "You will see!
Captain and the Dancer and Lolita, the Little One, La Golondrina, and
Ignacio Chavez, all of you together until far out across the desert men
hear. For it is in the air that things will happen. And then, when it
is all done . . . Why then, amigos, who but me is going to build a
little roof over you that runs down both ways, to save you from the hot
sun and the rains? . . . Oh, one knows. It is in the air. You will
see!"

For Jim Galloway had returned, a new Galloway, a Galloway who carried
himself up and down the street with bright, victorious eyes, and the
stride of full confidence, who, at least in the eyes of Ignacio Chavez,
was like a blood-lusting lion "screwing up his muscles" to spring.
Galloway's return brought to Roderick Norton a fresh vigilance, to
Virginia a sleepless anxiety, to Florence Engle unrest, uncertainty,
very nearly pure panic. During the first few days of his absence she
had allowed herself the romantic joy of floating unchecked upon the
tide of a girlish fancy, dreaming dreams after the approved fashion
which is youth's, dancing lightly upon foamy crests, seeing only blue
water and no rocks under her. Then, with the potency of the man's
character removed with the removal of his physical being, she grew to
see the shoal