sly whirring rattlesnake on which it narrowly escaped treading,
began to "pitch" violently and for a few minutes Constance was treated
to an exhibition of superb horsemanship which made her blood tingle. It
was an unusually severe and long-sustained struggle between horse and
rider, but the man conquered as a matter of course and the rest of the
journey was without incident.

She had acquired the knack of dismounting by placing one hand on his
left shoulder; in doing so, this evening, her bare hand encountered
something wet and sticky. At that moment the door opened and a flood of
light from the living-room illuminated them sharply. Looking curiously
at her wet hand Constance caught her breath with a gasp.

"It is blood!" she cried in horror. "You are hurt!"

Despite his muttered assurance that it was nothing to be alarmed about
she drew him into the living-room, where she became almost hysterical at
the black-red blotch on his thin tan-colored silk shirt. Almost before
he suspected what she was about she had unknotted the kerchief from
around his throat and hastily bared his shoulder. In the violent
plunging of the horse the clumsily-fixed bandage had become displaced,
the wound had reopened and was bleeding freely.

Although entirely unaccustomed to the sight of any kind of wounds, she
knew intuitively from the tiny blue-rimmed red puncture on the massive
shoulder that this was a gun-shot injury. She ran over to her work
basket and secured a pair of scissors with which she unhesitatingly cut
away the shirt from the collar downwards, exposing the ragged gash of
exit on the other side. To 'Rastus, watching her with open mouth and
protruding eyes, she said sharply:

"Water, and some clean linen cloths, quick!"

She was a different woman now, and her subsequent ministrations were as
deft and as effectual as those of a trained nurse. Very tenderly she
bathed the shoulder, wondering all the while at its contrastive
whiteness with the bronzed face and throat, marveling at the silky
rippling of the muscles beneath as he obediently flexed his arm at her
command. In less than ten minutes she had completed her surgery and in
five more he was again rehabilitated in garments fetched by 'Rastus
from his room in the bunkhouse. She would not hear of his attending to
the horses, but had one of the men summoned, to whom their care was
delegated. If she detected Douglass's dejected wink at the smiling young
fellow, she made no sig