ample of it that had ever come to her notice.
She distinctly disapproved of the motive of it, but she blushed to think
how glad she was that he had come safely out of the jaws of death with
colors flying.

Strangely enough, she appreciated the Alcazar incident to the full, and
at her brother's graphic relation evinced no surprise. She could readily
understand this kind of courage and she only commended his tact. "He was
master of the situation," she remarked, with an insight into the facts
astonishing in one who had never in all her life heard a word spoken in
anger; "and it is absurd to think that he was ignorantly exposing
himself to inevitable death. He would have shot first in any event--and
I think he would have hit." A conclusion so prescient that her brother
gasped with astonishment.

"I guess your estimate of him tallies with mine, sis," he said
teasingly. "I fell in love with him at first sight."

"How perfectly absurd!" she returned, with a rebuking hauteur, and
deftly changing the subject proceeded to regale Mrs. Vaughan with the
details of New York's latest operatic sensation. But she relented enough
to clasp her soft white arm about her brother's neck just before
retiring that night and whisper:

"It was very lovely and noble of him to try and send you out of danger.
Oh! Bobbie, what would I have done if--"

Carter kissed her tenderly. "It was the whitest thing I ever saw,
Gracie, and I want you to try and help me make it up to him. The man is
a gentleman, too, no matter what his past has been. And with your aid we
will keep him such. Besides, our fortune is in his hands to all intents
and purposes and something tells me we are going to owe him much in the
days to come."

It may have been telepathy, and then again it may have only been
coincidence; but certain it is that at the very moment Grace Carter
knelt beside her little white bed, Ken Douglass sitting on the edge of
his bunk took from about his neck a slender gold chain to which was
attached a locket, opened it with trembling hands and laid his lips with
infinite tenderness and reverence on the mouth of the sweet-faced woman
pictured therein.

"Oh! Mother," he prayed, "help me to make good!"

CHAPTER IV

IN THE MIDST OF ALARUMS

Luxuriously hammocked in the delightful cool of the broad veranda
surrounding three sides of the C Bar ranch house, Grace Carter lay
dreamily watching the shadow-dance on the slope of the fast purpling
ra