right sure of it I'll be jogging along
to Dead Man's Cache, and you can go order the coffin for your boss."

The venom of the man was something to wonder at. It filled the listening
girl with sick apprehension. She had not known that such hatred could live
in the world.

Quietly she led her pony back, mounted, and made a wide detour until she
struck the trail above. Already she could hear the distant bleat of sheep
which told her that the herd was entering the pass. Recklessly she urged
her pony forward, galloping into the saddle between the peaks without
regard to the roughness of the boulder-strewn path. A voice from above
hailed her with a startled shout as she flew past. Again, a shot rang out,
the bullet whistling close to her ear. But nothing could stop her till she
reached the man she meant to save.

And so it happened that Richard Bellamy, walking at the head of his herd,
saw a horse gallop wildly round a bend almost into his bleating flock. The
rider dragged the bronco to a halt and slipped to the ground. She stood
there ashen-hued, clinging to the saddle-horn and swaying slightly.

"I'm in time.... Thank God!... Thank God!" her parched lips murmured.

"Miss Lee! You here?" he cried.

They looked at each other, the man and the girl, while the wild fear in
her heart began to still. The dust of the drive was thick on his boots,
his clothes, his face, but the soil of travel could not obscure the power
of his carriage, the strong lines of his shoulders, the set of his broad,
flat back, any more than it could tarnish her rarity, the sweetness of
blood in her that under his gaze beat faintly into her dusky cheeks. The
still force of him somehow carried reassurance to her. Such virility of
manhood could not be marked for extinction.

She panted out her story, and his eyes never left her.

"You have risked your life to save mine and my herders," he said very
quietly.

"You must go back," she replied irrelevantly.

"I can't. The entrance is guarded."

This startled her. "Then--what shall we do?"

"You must ride forward at once. Tell the vaqueros that I am moving my
sheep only to take them to the railroad. Explain to them how Alan is
detained with the message I sent Farnum. In a few minutes we shall follow
with the sheep."

"And if they don't believe that you are going out of the sheep
business--what then?"

"I shall have to take my chance of that."

She seemed about to speak, but changed her mind, nod