He died in the night alone. Emily Bogardus had cause to hate the man when
he was living, and his dreary end was long a shuddering remembrance to
her, like the answer to an unforgiving prayer.

The station was in a hollow with bare hills around, rising to the highest
point of that rolling plain country. The mountains sink below the plain,
only their white tops showing. It was October. All the wild grass had been
eaten close for miles on both sides of the road, but over a gap in the
Western divide was the Bruneau Valley, where the bell-mare of the team had
been raised. In the night she broke her hopples and struck out across the
summit with the four mules at her heels. Towards morning a light snow fell
and covered their tracks. Adam was compelled to hunt his stock on foot;
the keeper refusing him a horse, saying he had got himself into trouble
before through being friendly with the company's horses. He started out
across the hills, expecting that the same night would see him back, and
his wife was left in the wagon camp alone.

* * * * *

"I know this story very well," said Paul, "and yet I never heard it but
once, when mother decided I was old enough to know all. But every word was
bitten into me--especially this ugly part I am coming to. I wish it need
not be told, yet all the rest depends on it; and that such an experience
could come to a woman like my mother shows what exposure and humiliation
lie in the straightest path if there is no money to smooth the way. You
hear it said that in the West the toughest men will be chivalrous to a
woman if she is the right sort of a woman. I'm afraid that is a romantic
theory of the Western man.

"That night, before his team stampeded, as he sat by the keeper's fire,