man running beside the horse. Presently he stopped, as if the
arrangement were not satisfactory; and the second man swung
behind him on the pony. Later, when she turned in her saddle, she
saw that they had left the road and were cutting across the
plain, as if to take the sharpshooter in the rear.

Her troubled thoughts stayed with her even after she had reached
the ranch. She was nervously excited, keyed up to a high pitch;
for she knew that out on the desert, within a mile or two of her,
men were stalking each other with life or death in the balance as
the price of vigilance, skill and an unflawed steel nerve. While
she herself had been in danger, she had been mistress of her
fear. But now she could do nothing but wait, after ordering out
such reinforcements as she could recruit without delay; and the
inaction told upon her swift, impulsive temperament. Once, twice,
the wind brought to her a faint sound.

She had been pacing the porch, but she stopped, white as a sheet.
Behind those faint explosions might lie a sinister tragedy. Her
mind projected itself into a score of imaginary possibilities.
She listened, breathless in her tensity, but no further echo of
that battlefield reached her. The sun still shone warmly on brown
Wyoming. She looked down into a rolling plain that blurred in the
distance from knobs and flat spaces into a single stretch that
included a thousand rises and depressions. That roll of country
teemed with life, but the steady, inexorable sun beat down on
what seemed a shining, primeval waste of space. Yet somewhere in
that space the tragedy was being determined--unless it had been
already enacted.