e
would read it. By the dim flame of a guttering candle, in a cotton
nightgown borrowed from a Mexican menial, a prisoner of the very man who
had robbed her and the recipient of a practical confession of love
from him not three hours earlier! Surely here was a situation to beggar
romance. But before she had finished reading the reality was still more
unbelievable.

I have just met for the first time the woman I am going to marry if God
is good to one. I am writing this because I want her to know it as soon
as I decently can. Of course, I am not worthy of her, but then I don't
know any man that is.

So the fact goes--I'm bound to marry her if there's nobody else in the
way. This isn't conceit. It is a deep-seated certainty I can't get away
from, and don't want to. When she reads this, she will think it a piece
of foolish presumption. My hope is she will not always think so. Her
Lover,

VAL COLLINS.

Her swift-pulsing heart was behaving very queerly. It seemed to hang
delightfully still, and then jump forward with odd little beats of
joy. She caught a glimpse of her happy face, and blew out the light for
shame, groping her way back to bed with the letter carefully guarded
against crumpling by her hand.

Foolish presumption indeed. Why, he had only seen her once, and he said
he would marry her with never a by-your-leave! Wasn't that what he had
said? She had to strike another match to learn the lines that had not
stuck word for word in her mind, and after that another match to get a
picture of the scrawl to visualize in the dark.

How dared he take her for granted? But what a masterly way of wooing for
the right man! What idiotic folly if he had been the wrong one! Was he,
then, the right one? She questioned herself closely, but came to no more
definite answer than this--that her heart went glad with a sweet joy to
know he wanted to marry her.

She resolved to put him from her mind, and in this resolve she fell at
last into smiling sleep.

CHAPTER 19. A VILLON OF THE DESERT

When Alice Mackenzie looked back in after years upon the incidents
connected with that ride to the Rocking Chair, it was always with a kind
of glorified pride in her villain-hero. He had his moments, had this
twentieth-century Villon, when he represented not unworthily the
divinity in man; and this day held more than one of them. Since he was
what he was, it also held as many of his black moods.

The start was delayed, owing to a caus