Mary could only shake her head hopelessly.

“Firio and Jag Ear and Wrath of God and old P.D. here—­we’ve sort of grown used to one another’s foolishness.  Now I can’t put it off any longer, and I’d about as soon be murdered as tell him that I am going East in the morning.”

“You mean you are going to leave here for good?” She mistrusted her own hearing.  She was dazzled by this sudden burst of light through the clouds.

“Yes, by the first train.  This is my last desert ride.”

Why had he not said so at first?  It would not only have saved her from worry, but from the humiliation of pleading with a stranger.  Doubtless he had enjoyed teasing her.  But no matter.  The affair need not last much longer, now.  She told herself that, if necessary, she would mount guard over him for the remaining twelve hours of his stay.  Once he was aboard the Pullman he would be out of danger; her responsibility would be over and the whole affair would become a bizarre memory; an incident closed.

“Back to New York,” he said, as one who enters a fog without a compass.  “Back to fight pleosaurs, dinosaurs, and all kinds of monsters,” he added, with a cheeriness which rang with the first false note she had heard from him.  “I don’t care,” he concluded, and broke into a Spanish air, whose beat ran with the trickling hoof-beats of the ponies in the sand.

“That is it!” she thought.  “That explains.  He just does not care about anything.”

Ahead, the lamps were beginning to twinkle in the little settlement which had sent such a contrast in citizenship as Mary Ewold and Pete Leddy out to the pass.  They were approaching a single, isolated building, from the door of which came a spray of light and the sound of men’s voices.

“That is Bill Lang’s place,” Mary explained.  “He keeps a store, with a bar in the rear.  He also has the post-office, thanks to his political influence, and this is where I have to stop for the mail when I return from the pass.”

She had not spoken with any sense of a hint which it was inevitable he should accept.

“Let me get it for you;” and before she had time to protest, he had dismounted, drawing rein at the edge of the wooden steps.

She rode past where his pony was standing.  When he entered the door, his tallness and lean ease of posture silhouetted in the light, she could look in on the group of idling male gossips.

“Don’t!”

It was a half cry from her, hardly audible in an intensity which she knew was futile in the surge of her torturing self-incrimination.  Why had she not thought that it would be here that Pete Leddy was bound to wait for anyone coming in by the trail from Galeria?  The loungers suddenly dropped to the cover of boxes and barrels, as a flicker of steel shot upward, and behind the gleaming rim of a revolver muzzle held rigid was a brown hand and Leddy’s hard, unyielding face.