ere the
Princess of the Rio Chama was born. This was her room when she was a
girl until she went away to school. She slept in that very bed. Down on
your knees, sir, and worship at the shrine."

He met with a laugh the cool, light scorn of her banter. Yet something
in him warmed to his environment. He had the feeling of having come into
more intimate touch with her past than he had yet done. The sight of
that plain little bed went to the source of his emotions. How many times
had his love knelt beside it in her night-gown and offered up her pure
prayers to the God she worshiped!

He made his good-byes soon after their return to Mrs. Underwood. Dick
was a long way from a sentimentalist, but he wanted to be alone and
adjust his mind to the new conception of his sweetheart brought by her
childhood home. It was a night of little moonlight. As he walked toward
the hotel he could see nothing of the escort that had been his during
the past few days. He wondered if perhaps they had got tired of
shadowing his movements.

The road along which he was passing had on both sides of it a row of big
cottonwoods, whose branches met in an arch above. Dick, with that
instinct for safety which every man-hunter has learned, walked down the
middle of the street, eyes and ears alert for the least sign of an
ambush.

Two men approached on the plank sidewalk. They were quarreling. Suddenly
a knife flashed, and one of the men went with an oath to the ground.
Dick reached for his gun and plunged straight for the assailant, who had
stooped as if to strike again the prostrate man. The rescuer stumbled
over a taut rope and at the same moment a swarm of men fell upon him.
Even as he rose and shook off the clutching hands Gordon knew that he
was the victim of a ruse.

He had lost his revolver in the fall. With clenched fists he struck hard
and sure. They swarmed upon him, so many that they got in each other's
way. Now he was down, now up again. They swayed to and fro in a huddle,
as does a black bear surrounded by a pack of dogs. Still the man at the
heart of the melee struck--and struck--and struck again. Men went down
and were trodden under foot, but he reeled on, stumbling as he went,
turning, twisting, hitting hard and sure with all the strength that many
good clean years in the open had stored within him. Blows fell upon his
curly head as it rose now and again out of the storm--blows of guns, of
knives, of bony knuckles. Yet he staggered fo