ranch.

Madeline observed then that the horses were once more trotting.
The wind was colder, the night darker, the foot-hills flatter.
And the sky was now a wonderful deep velvet-blue blazing with
millions of stars. Some of them were magnificent. How strangely
white and alive! Again Madeline felt the insistence of familiar
yet baffling associations. These white stars called strangely to
her or haunted her.



V The Round-Up

It was a crackling and roaring of fire that awakened Madeline
next morning, and the first thing she saw was a huge stone
fireplace in which lay a bundle of blazing sticks. Some one had
kindled a fire while she slept. For a moment the curious
sensation of being lost returned to her. She just dimly
remembered reaching the ranch and being taken into a huge house
and a huge, dimly lighted room. And it seemed to her that she
had gone to sleep at once, and had awakened without remembering
how she had gotten to bed.

But she was wide awake in an instant. The bed stood near one end
of an enormous chamber. The adobe walls resembled a hall in an
ancient feudal castle, stone-floored, stone-walled, with great
darkened rafters running across the ceiling. The few articles of
furniture were worn out and sadly dilapidated. Light flooded
into the room from two windows on the right of the fireplace and