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 subsided. She was nervous now, and apprehensive of reprisal.

"I think they'll come back," she said, her anxious watch upon the road resumed. "That man must have been—he must have been pretty badly hurt, don't you think?"

Tom Simpson had loaded his pipe. He had it clamped in his teeth now with an expression of deep determination rather than anticipation of enjoyment, his metal match-case in his hand. He nodded, lighting a match on the end of the box with a quick little dig.

"Very likely"—puffing hard to get the damp tobacco started, a cloud of smoke enlarging around his head—"very-very likely."

There was a sort of detached indifference in his words, as if he spoke of something he had witnessed but had no direct concern in, a passing incident of his day. The girl looked at him strangely, a volume of unsatisfied curiosity in her wondering dark eyes.

"There are a lot of bad men over in the Nation," she said. "I think that gang came from down there."

"I'm not acquainted with the lairs of such gentry in this part of the country, Miss Ellison, but I dare say you're right. This is a beautiful home-setting you have here; there's a feeling of comfort in the atmosphere I've seldom found in western ranches—they're generally so raw, you know, so confounded bare. They take everything out of tins in Wyoming, even onions, if you will believe me, Miss Ellison."

He looked at her so seriously, so steadily, that Eudora was obliged to laugh in spite of the gloom that had suc-