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 road. He would be camping at this branch, or that stock well with the windmill, or in a named piece of timber where he'd have wood for his fire.

It had been a long time since she had felt this disturbing anxiety for one of her men abroad, not since Ellison used to laugh at her fears in the old Pawnee days. And he had lived through those perils, healed of many a wound taken in battles with those swift-riding raiders who swept up from the south. She had not worried much about him when he spent day and night for three weeks on the blizzard-bound prairies trying to save some of his cattle from the disastrous winter kill, for the woman at home is not so much afraid of nature at its worst as she is of man at his meanest.

The winter storm had done what the Pawnee raiders, the horsethieves and rustlers of the Cherokee trails had failed to do. It had taken Ellison's life. And yet, there was nothing in the sound of the rising storm to make her face blanch, her heart drag with the slow pain of apprehension, that there was in the beat of galloping hoofs on the road at night. So many messengers of danger and disaster, so many appeals for help in extremity, had come on clattering hoofs to her door through the hampering, shudderful, villainy-shrouding dark.

All of those old ghosts of dead fears had risen with this unknown peril into which Tom Simpson had driven away from her gate. She arraigned herself for permitting him to go, when she knew neither command nor persuasion would have restrained him. All night she lay in that hot state of unrest between wakefulness and sleep, straining for the sound of a galloping horse. She had yielded to the weary