r were
loosed on her head, and the black hair framed a face stained, flushed,
with eyes that were like a great black, bottomless well of sorrow and
wistfulness. And the hand which stretched toward him, palm up, was a
symbol of everything new and strange that he found in her.

He had seen it balled to a small, angry fist, brown and dangerous; he
had seen it gripping the butt of a revolver, ready for the draw; he had
seen it tugging at the reins and holding a racing horse in check with
an ease which a man would envy; but never before had he seen it turned
palm up, to his knowledge; and now, because he could not speak to her,
according to his plan, he studied her thoroughly for the first time.

Slender and marvelously made was that hand. The whole woman was in it,
finely fashioned, delicate, made for beauty, not for use. It was all
he could do to keep from exclaiming.

She made a quick step toward him, eager, uncertain:

"Pierre, I thought you had left me--that you were gone, and angry."

The hearts of men are tinder; something caught on fire in Pierre, but
still he would say nothing. He was beginning to feel a cruel pleasure
in his victory, but it was not without a deep sense of danger.

She had laid aside her six-gun, but she had not abandoned it. She had
laid aside her anger, but she could resume it again as swiftly as she
could take up her revolver.

He exulted in the touch of victory, but it was as a man who rides a
horse that paces docilely beneath him but may plunge into a fury of
bucking in a moment. She was closer--very close, and somehow he knew
that at his pleasure he could make her smile or tremble by speaking.
Yet he would not speak. The five minutes were not yet up.

She cried with a little burst of rage: "Pierre, you are making a game
of me!"

But seeing that he did not change she altered swiftly and caught his
hand in both of hers. She spoke the name which she always used when
she was greatly moved.

"Ah, Pierre le Rouge, what have I done?"

His silence tempted her on like the smile of the sphinx.

And suddenly she was inside his arms, though how she separated them he
could not tell, and crying: "Pierre, I am unhappy. Help me, Pierre!"

It was true, then, and Wilbur had won his bet. But how could it have
happened? He took the arms that encircled his neck and brought them
slowly down, and watched her curiously. Something was expected of him,
but what it was he could not tell, for w