She ran swiftly up to the ridge, impelled by the blind memory of having met him there at night and the one vague thought to give him warning.  But it was dark and empty, with no sound but the rushing wind.  And then an idea seized her.  If he were haunting the vicinity still, he might see the fluttering of the clothes upon the line and believe she was there.  She stooped quickly, and in the merciful and exonerating darkness stripped off her only white petticoat and pinned it on the line.  It flapped, fluttered, and streamed in the mountain wind.  She lingered and listened.  But there came a sound she had not counted on,—­the clattering hoofs of not one, but many, horses on the lower road!  She ran back to the house to find its inmates already hastening towards the road for news.  She took that chance to slip in quietly, go to her room, whose window commanded a view of the ridge, and crouching low behind it she listened.  She could hear the sound of voices, and the dull trampling of heavy boots on the dusty path towards the barnyard on the other side of the house—­a pause, and then the return of the trampling boots, and the final clattering of hoofs on the road again.  Then there was a tap on her door and her mother’s querulous voice.

“Oh! yer there, are ye?  Well—­it’s the best place fer a girl—­with all these man’s doin’s goin’ on!  They’ve got that Mexican horse-thief and have tied him up in your filly’s stall in the barn—­till the ’Frisco deputy gets back from rounding up the others.  So ye jest stay where ye are till they’ve come and gone, and we’re shut o’ all that cattle.  Are ye mindin’?”

“All right, maw; ‘taint no call o’ mine, anyhow,” returned Lanty, through the half-open door.

At another time her mother might have been startled at her passive obedience.  Still more would she have been startled had she seen her daughter’s face now, behind the closed door—­with her little mouth set over her clenched teeth.  And yet it was her own child, and Lanty was her mother’s real daughter; the same pioneer blood filled their veins, the blood that had never nourished cravens or degenerates, but had given itself to sprinkle and fertilize desert solitudes where man might follow.  Small wonder, then, that this frontier-born Lanty, whose first infant cry had been answered by the yelp of wolf and scream of panther; whose father’s rifle had been leveled across her cradle to cover the stealthy Indian who prowled outside, small wonder that she should feel herself equal to these “man’s doin’s,” and prompt to take a part.  For even in the first shock of the news of the capture she recalled the fact that the barn was old and rotten, that only that day the filly had kicked a board loose from behind her stall, which she, Lanty, had lightly returned to avoid “making a fuss.”  If his captors had not noticed it, or trusted only to their guards, she might make the opening wide enough to free him!