“No!  They say he comes o’ old Spanish stock, a bad egg they threw outer the nest, I reckon,” put in Hopper eagerly, seeing a strange animated interest dilating Lanty’s eyes, and hoping to share in it; “but he’s reg’lar high-toned, you bet!  Why, I knew a man who seed him in his own camp—­prinked out in a velvet jacket and silk sash, with gold chains and buttons down his wide pants and a dagger stuck in his sash, with a handle just blazin’ with jew’ls.  Yes!  Miss Atalanty, they say that one stone at the top—­a green stone, what they call an ’em’ral’—­was worth the price o’ a ’Frisco house-lot.  True ez you live!  Eh—­what’s up now?”

Lanty’s book had fallen on the floor as she was rising to her feet with a white face, still more strange and distorted in an affected yawn behind her little hand.  “Yer makin’ me that sick and nervous with yer fool yarns,” she said hysterically, “that I’m goin’ to get a little fresh air.  It’s just stifling here with lies and terbacker!” With another high laugh, she brushed past him into the kitchen, opened the door, and then paused, and, turning, ran rapidly up to her bedroom.  Here she locked herself in, tore open the bosom of her dress, plucked out the dagger, threw it on the bed, where the green stone gleamed for an instant in the candlelight, and then dropped on her knees beside the bed with her whirling head buried in her cold red hands.

It had all come to her in a flash, like a blaze of lightning,—­the black, haunting figure on the ridge, the broken saddle girth, the abandonment of the dagger in the exigencies of flight and concealment; the second meeting, the skulking in the dry, alder-hidden “run,” the changed dress, the lighter-colored hair, but always the same voice and laugh—­the leader, the fugitive, the Mexican horse-thief!  And she, the Godforsaken fool, the chuckle-headed nigger baby, with not half the sense of her own filly or that sop-headed Hopper—­had never seen it!  She—­she who would be the laughing-stock of them all—­she had thought him a “locater,” a “towny” from ’Frisco!  And she had consented to keep his knife until he would call for it,—­yes, call for it, with fire and flame perhaps, the trampling of hoofs, pistol shots—­and—­yet—­

Yet!—­he had trusted her.  Yes! trusted her when he knew a word from her lips would have brought the whole district down on him! when the mere exposure of that dagger would have identified and damned him!  Trusted her a second time, when she was within cry of her house!  When he might have taken her filly without her knowing it?  And now she remembered vaguely that the neighbors had said how strange it was that her father’s stock had not suffered as theirs had.  He had protected them—­he who was now a fugitive—­and their men pursuing him!  She rose suddenly with a single stamp of her narrow foot, and as suddenly became cool and sane.  And then, quite her old self again, she lazily picked up the dagger and restored it to its place in her bosom.  That done, with her color back and her eyes a little brighter, she deliberately went downstairs again, stuck her little brown head into the sitting-room, said cheerfully, “Still yawpin’, you folks,” and quietly passed out into the darkness.