Durade’s face grew livid with rage and fear.  And in that moment the mask was off.  The nature of the Spaniard stood forth.  Another manifest fact was that Durade had not before matched himself against a gambler of Hough’s caliber.

“Well, are you only a bluff or do we go on with the game?” inquired Hough.

Durade choked back his rage and signified with a motion of his hand that play should be resumed.

Allie fastened her eyes upon the door.  She was in a tumult of emotion.  Despite that, her mind revolved wild and intermittent ideas as to the risk of letting Neale see and recognize her there.  Yet her joy was so overpowering that she believed if he entered the door she would rush to him and trust in God to save her.  In God and Reddy King!  She remembered the cowboy, and a thrill linked all her emotions.  Durade and his gang would face a terrible reckoning if Reddy King ever entered to see her there.

Moments passed.  The gambling went on.  The players spoke low; the spectators were silent.  Discordant sounds from outside disturbed the quiet.

Allie stared fixedly at the door.  Presently it opened.  Ancliffe entered with several men, all quick in movement, alert of eye.  But Neale and Larry King were not among them.  Allie’s heart sank like lead.  The revulsion of feeling, the disappointment, was sickening.  She saw Ancliffe shake his head, and divined in the action that he had not been able to find the friends Hough wanted particularly.  Then Allie felt the incredible strangeness of being glad that Neale was not to find her there—­that Larry was not to throw his guns on Durade’s crowd.  There might be a chance of her being liberated without violence.

This reaction left her weak and dazed for a while.  Still she heard the low voices of the gamesters, the slap of cards and clink of gold.  Her wits had gone from her ever since the mention of Neale.  She floundered in a whirl of thoughts and fears until gradually she recovered self-possession.  Whatever instinct or love or spirit had guided her had done so rightly.  She had felt Neale’s presence in Benton.  It was stingingly sweet to realize that.  Her heart swelled with pangs of fullest measure.  Surely he again believed her dead.  Soon he would come upon her—­face to face—­somewhere.  He would learn she was alive—­unharmed—­true to him with all her soul.  Indians, renegade Spaniards, Benton with its terrors, a host of evil men, not these nor anything else could keep her from Neale forever.  She had believed that always, but never as now, in the clearness of this beautiful spiritual insight.  Behind her belief was something unfathomable and great.  Not the movement of progress as typified by those men who had dreamed of the railroad, nor the spirit of the unconquerable engineers as typified by Neale, nor the wildness of wild youth like Larry King, nor the heroic labor and simplicity and sacrifice of common men, nor the inconceivable passion of these gamblers for gold, nor the mystery hidden in the mad laughter of these fallen women, strange and sad on the night wind—­not any of these things nor all of them, wonderful and incalculable as they were, loomed so great as the spirit that upheld Allie Lee.