rable conditions, during times of peace, the trip
she was taking would have been a delightful outing. Just now things
were different. Small garrisons of American soldiers had crowded
forward and were occupying the largest cities along her route. As yet
she had not gotten beyond them. "A guilty conscience needs no accuser";
everywhere that she went she imagined herself to be under suspicion.

Far up in the Caraballos she came across a little mountain torrent
which leaped down over the mountain side from one rocky ledge to
another at quite regular intervals in a series of waterfalls until it
beat itself into a turbulent spray in the bed of the chasm below. The
laughing moon filtered its beaming rays through the thin sheet of
shimmering water as it danced down its course from precipice to
precipice, and seemingly converted it into a great silvery stair-way
connecting earth with heaven. Marie's heart throbbed with emotion. The
dashing of the falling water on the rocks below in the bed of the canon
made a hollow sound as its echoes reverberated through the gorge above.

A half mile farther up, the valley widened somewhat; and finding here
some grass for her pony to forage on, she stopped for the night. The
flimsy saddle was removed from her horse and converted into a crude
pillow, in true cowboy style. Marie was uneasy. This was the first
night in all her adventures that she had been absolutely alone,
separated from both friends and foes, with no house to shelter her
weary head, with the cloudless canopy of the silent heavens arched
above her, the silvery moonbeams dancing in her face, and with
no voice, save the echoes of her own, to answer back the whispers
of night.

It is often only in such a silent nook as this, with no one present
but God and self, that humanity asserts itself and the tenderest
portions of the human soul become paramount and give rise to
sacred thoughts. Even the savage cannot escape it, for he, too,
feels his responsibility to something outside of self. No doubt the
self-conscious criminal would be the most susceptible to it.

What a night for Marie! Solitude gave rise to fear; fear, to conscious
criminality; a sense of wrong-doing, to grief. Would morning never
come? Every time she fell into a doze her sleep was disturbed by dreams
of the past. Recollections of her dying benefactor in the woods by
the San Mateo river, of Gilmore's comrades bleeding by his side, and
of Lawton in the arms of his ai