“Because I thought you might be lonely, Sally.”

“I was.”

It was strange to see how little fencing there was between them.  They were like men, long tried in friendship and working together on a great problem full of significance to both.

“Do you know what I kept sayin’ to myself when I found you was gone?”

“Well?”

“Todo es perdo; todo es perdo!”

She had said it so often to herself that now some of the original emotion crept into her voice.  His arm went out; they shook hands across their breakfast pans.

She went on:  “The next thing is Drew?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no changing you.”  She did not wait for his answer.  “I know that.  I won’t ask questions.  If it has to be done we’ll do it quickly; and afterward I can find a way out for us both.”

Something like a foreknowledge came to him, telling him that the thing would never be done—­that he had surrendered his last chance of Drew when he turned back to go to Sally.  It was as if he took a choice between the killing of the man and the love of the woman.  But he said nothing of his forebodings and helped her quietly to rearrange the small pack.  They saddled and took the trail which pointed up over the mountains—­the same trail which they had ridden in an opposite direction the night before.

He rode with his head turned, taking his last look at the old house of Drew, with its blackened, crumbling sides, when the girl cried softly:  “What’s that?  Look!”

He stared in the direction of her pointing arm.  They were almost directly under the shoulder of rocks which loomed above the trail along the edge of the lake.  Anthony saw nothing.

“What was it?”

He checked his horse beside hers.

“I thought I saw something move.  I’m not sure.  And there—­back, Anthony!”

And she whirled her horse.  He caught it this time clearly, the unmistakable glint of the morning light on steel, and he turned the grey sharply.  At the same time a rattling blast of revolver shots crackled above them; the grey reared and pitched back.

By inches he escaped the fall of the horse, slipping from the saddle in the nick of time.  A bullet whipped his hat from his head.  Then the hand of the girl clutched his shoulder.

“Stirrup and saddle, Anthony!”

He seized the pommel of the saddle, hooked his foot into the stirrup which she abandoned to him, and she spurred back toward the old house.

A shout followed them, a roar that ended in a harsh rattle of curses; they heard the spat of bullets several times on the trees past which they whirled.  But it was only a second before they were once more in the shelter of the house.  He stood in the centre of the room, stunned, staring stupidly around him.  It was not fear of death that benumbed him, but a rising horror that he should be so trapped—­like a wild beast cornered and about to be worried to death by dogs.