r the first time she raised
her glance to the bearer. The boy was so sun-blackened that the paler
skin of the eyelids made his eyes seem supremely large. He was now
poised accurately on one foot, rubbing his calloused heel up and down
his shin, while he drank in the particulars of the telegraph office. He
could hardly be a party to a deception. She looked over the note again,
and read:

DEAR MISS MANNING:

I am a couple of miles out of Lukin, in a place to which the
bearer of this note will bring you. I am sure you will come,
for I am in trouble, out of which you can very easily help me.
It is a matter which I cannot confide to any other person in
Lukin. I am impatiently expecting you.

BEN CONNOR.

She crumpled the note in her hand thoughtfully, but, on the verge of
dropping it in the waste basket, she smoothed it again, and for the
third time went over the contents. Then she rose abruptly and confided
her place to the lad who idled at the counter.

"The wire's dead," she told him. "Besides, I'll be back in an hour or
so."

And she rode off a moment later with the boy. He had a blanket-pad
without stirrups, and he kept prodding the sliding elbows of the horse
with his bare toes while he chattered at Ruth, for the drum of the
sounder had fascinated him and he wanted it explained. She listened to
him with a smile of inattention, for she was thinking busily of Connor.
Those thoughts made her look down to the dust that puffed up from the
feet of the horses and became a light mist behind them; then, raising
her head, she saw the blue ravines of the farther mountains and the sun
haze about the crests. Connor had always been to her as the ship is to a
traveler; the glamour of strange places was about him.

Presently they left the trail, and passing about a hillside, came to an
old shack whose unpainted wood had blackened with time.

"There he is," said the boy, and waving his hand to her, turned his pony
on the back trail at a gallop.

Connor called to her from the shack and came to meet her, but she had
dismounted before he could reach the stirrup. He kept her hand in his
for a moment as he greeted her. It surprised him to find how glad he was
to see her. He told her so frankly.

"After the mountains and all that," he said cheerfully, "it's like
meeting an old chum again to see you. How have things been going?"

This direct friendliness in a young man was something new to the