* * *

“Well, what did you do last night after we left?”

“Oh, took a stroll,” Chris answered.

Lute’s eyes were quizzical as she asked with a tentativeness that was palpably assumed, “With—­a—­with Mr. Barton?”

“Why, yes.”

“And a smoke?”

“Yes; and now what’s it all about?”

Lute broke into merry laughter.  “Just as I told you that you would do.  Am I not a prophet?  But I knew before I saw you that my forecast had come true.  I have just left Mr. Barton, and I knew he had walked with you last night, for he is vowing by all his fetishes and idols that you are a perfectly splendid young man.  I could see it with my eyes shut.  The Chris Dunbar glamour has fallen upon him.  But I have not finished the catechism by any means.  Where have you been all morning?”

“Where I am going to take you this afternoon.”

“You plan well without knowing my wishes.”

“I knew well what your wishes are.  It is to see a horse I have found.”

Her voice betrayed her delight, as she cried, “Oh, good!”

“He is a beauty,” Chris said.

But her face had suddenly gone grave, and apprehension brooded in her eyes.

“He’s called Comanche,” Chris went on.  “A beauty, a regular beauty, the perfect type of the Californian cow-pony.  And his lines—­why, what’s the matter?”

“Don’t let us ride any more,” Lute said, “at least for a while.  Really, I think I am a tiny bit tired of it, too.”

He was looking at her in astonishment, and she was bravely meeting his eyes.

“I see hearses and flowers for you,” he began, “and a funeral oration; I see the end of the world, and the stars falling out of the sky, and the heavens rolling up as a scroll; I see the living and the dead gathered together for the final judgement, the sheep and the goats, the lambs and the rams and all the rest of it, the white-robed saints, the sound of golden harps, and the lost souls howling as they fall into the Pit—­all this I see on the day that you, Lute Story, no longer care to ride a horse.  A horse, Lute! a horse!”

“For a while, at least,” she pleaded.

“Ridiculous!” he cried.  “What’s the matter?  Aren’t you well?—­you who are always so abominably and adorably well!”

“No, it’s not that,” she answered.  “I know it is ridiculous, Chris, I know it, but the doubt will arise.  I cannot help it.  You always say I am so sanely rooted to the earth and reality and all that, but—­perhaps it’s superstition, I don’t know—­but the whole occurrence, the messages of Planchette, the possibility of my father’s hand, I know not how, reaching, out to Ban’s rein and hurling him and you to death, the correspondence between my father’s statement that he has twice attempted your life and the fact that in the last two days your life has twice been endangered by horses—­my father was a great horseman—­all this, I