“Well, Clarence?”

She was looking at him half reproachfully, half coquettishly, with smiling, parted lips.  He hastened to forget himself and his troubles upon them twice and thrice.  Then she quickly disengaged herself, whispered, “Go, now,” and, as Mary’s call was repeated, Clarence heard her voice, high and clear, answering, “Here, dear,” as he was plunging into the thicket.

He had scarcely reached the madrono tree again and remounted his horse, before he heard the sound of hoofs approaching from the road.  In his present uneasiness he did not care to be discovered so near the rendezvous, and drew back into the shadow until the horseman should pass.  It was Peyton, with a somewhat disturbed face, riding rapidly.  Still less was he inclined to join or immediately follow him, but he was relieved when his host, instead of taking the direct road to the rancho, through the wild oats, turned off in the direction of the corral.

A moment later Clarence wheeled into the direct road, and presently found himself in the long afternoon shadows through the thickest of the grain.  He was riding slowly, immersed in thought, when he was suddenly startled by a hissing noise at his ear, and what seemed to be the uncoiling stroke of a leaping serpent at his side.  Instinctively he threw himself forward on his horse’s neck, and as the animal shied into the grain, felt the crawling scrape and jerk of a horsehair lariat across his back and down his horse’s flanks.  He reined in indignantly and stood up in his stirrups.  Nothing was to be seen above the level of the grain.  Beneath him the trailing riata had as noiselessly vanished as if it had been indeed a gliding snake.  Had he been the victim of a practical joke, or of the blunder of some stupid vacquero?  For he made no doubt that it was the lasso of one of the performers he had watched that afternoon.  But his preoccupied mind did not dwell long upon it, and by the time he had reached the wall of the old garden, the incident was forgotten.

CHAPTER VI.

Relieved of Clarence Brant’s embarrassing presence, Jim Hooker did not, however, refuse to avail himself of that opportunity to expound to the farmer and his family the immense wealth, influence, and importance of the friend who had just left him.  Although Clarence’s plan had suggested reticence, Hooker could not forego the pleasure of informing them that “Clar” Brant had just offered to let him into an extensive land speculation.  He had previously declined a large share or original location in a mine of Clarence’s, now worth a million, because it was not “his style.”  But the land speculation in a country of unsettled titles and lawless men, he need not remind them, required some experience of border warfare.  He would not say positively, although he left them to draw their own conclusions with gloomy significance, that this was why Clarence had sought him.  With this dark suggestion, he took leave of Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins and their daughter Phoebe the next day, not without some natural human emotion, and peacefully drove his team and wagon into the settlement of Fair Plains.