of reddish brown hair. He held the locket open in his hands for several
minutes, wondering who she could be, and what possible connection she
could have held with the dead. Something about that face smiling up into
his own held peculiar fascination for him, gripping him with a strange
feeling of familiarity, touching some dim memory which failed to respond.
Surely he had never seen the original, for she was not one to be easily
forgotten, and yet eyes, hair, expression, combined to remind him of some
one whom he had seen but could not bring definitely to mind. There were no
names on the locket, no marks of identification of any kind, yet realizing
the sacredness of it, Keith slipped the fragile gold chain about his neck,
and securely hid the trinket beneath his shirt.

It was noon by this time, the sun high overhead, and his horse, with
dangling rein, still nibbling daintily at the short grass. There was no
reason for his lingering longer. He swept his gaze the length and breadth
of the desolate valley, and across the river over the sand hills. All
alike appeared deserted, not a moving thing being visible between the
bluffs and the stream. Still he had the unpleasant feeling of being
watched, and it made him restless and eager to be away. The earlier gust
of anger, the spirit of revenge, had left him, but it had merely changed
into a dogged resolution to discover the perpetrators of this outrage and
bring them to justice for the crime. The face in the locket seemed to ask
it of him, and his nature urged response. But he could hope to accomplish
nothing more here, and the plainsman swung himself into the saddle. He
turned his horse's head eastward, and rode away. From the deeply rutted
trail he looked back to where the fire still smoked in the midst of that
desolate silence.