r whip,
spurred him. Stewart's iron arm held the horse. Then Madeline, in a
flash of passion, struck at Stewart's face, missed it, struck again, and
hit. With one pull, almost drawing her from the saddle, he tore the whip
from her hands. It was not that action on his part, or the sudden strong
masterfulness of his look, so much as the livid mark on his face where
the whip had lashed that quieted, if it did not check, her fury.

"That's nothing," he said, with something of his old audacity. "That's
nothing to how you've hurt me."

Madeline battled with herself for control. This man would not be denied.
Never before had the hardness of his face, the flinty hardness of these
desert-bred men, so struck her with its revelation of the unbridled
spirit. He looked stern, haggard, bitter. The dark shade was changing to
gray--the gray to ash-color of passion. About him now there was only the
ghost of that finer, gentler man she had helped to bring into being. The
piercing dark eyes he bent upon her burned her, went through her as
if he were looking into her soul. Then Madeline's quick sight caught a
fleeting doubt, a wistfulness, a surprised and saddened certainty in his
eyes, saw it shade and pass away. Her woman's intuition, as keen as her
sight, told her Stewart in that moment had sustained a shock of bitter,
final truth.

For the third time he repeated his question to her. Madeline did not
answer; she could not speak.

"You don't know I love you, do you?" he continued, passionately. "That
ever since you stood before me in that hole at Chiricahua I've loved
you? You can't see I've been another man, loving you, working for you,
living for you? You won't believe I've turned my back on the old wild
life, that I've been decent and honorable and happy and useful--your
kind of a cowboy? You couldn't tell, though I loved you, that I never
wanted you to know it, that I never dared to think of you except as my
angel, my holy Virgin? What do you know of a man's heart and soul? How
could you tell of the love, the salvation of a man who's lived his
life in the silence and loneliness? Who could teach you the actual
truth--that a wild cowboy, faithless to mother and sister, except in
memory, riding a hard, drunken trail straight to hell; had looked into
the face, the eyes of a beautiful woman infinitely beyond him, above
him, and had so loved her that he was saved--that he became faithful
again--that he saw her face in every flower and