Then, mounting, he slipped behind her and lifted and turned her, and then held her with his left arm so that she lay across the saddle and his knees, her head against his shoulder.

As the horse started into a rapid walk Madeline gradually lost all pain and discomfort when she relaxed her muscles.  Presently she let herself go and lay inert, greatly to her relief.  For a little while she seemed to be half drunk with the gentle swaying of a hammock.  Her mind became at once dreamy and active, as if it thoughtfully recorded the slow, soft impressions pouring in from all her senses.

A red glow faded in the west.  She could see out over the foothills, where twilight was settling gray on the crests, dark in the hollows.  Cedar and pinyon trees lined the trail, and there were no more firs.  At intervals huge drab-colored rocks loomed over her.  The sky was clear and steely.  A faint star twinkled.  And lastly, close to her, she saw Stewart’s face, once more dark and impassive, with the inscrutable eyes fixed on the trail.

His arm, like a band of iron, held her, yet it was flexible and yielded her to the motion of the horse.  One instant she felt the brawn, the bone, heavy and powerful; the next the stretch and ripple, the elasticity of muscles.  He held her as easily as if she were a child.  The roughness of his flannel shirt rubbed her cheek, and beneath that she felt the dampness of the scarf he had used to bathe her arm, and deeper still the regular pound of his heart.  Against her ear, filling it with strong, vibrant beat, his heart seemed a mighty engine deep within a great cavern.  Her head had never before rested on a man’s breast, and she had no liking for it there; but she felt more than the physical contact.  The position was mysterious and fascinating, and something natural in it made her think of life.  Then as the cool wind blew down from the heights, loosening her tumbled hair, she was compelled to see strands of it curl softly into Stewart’s face, before his eyes, across his lips.  She was unable to reach it with her free hand, and therefore could not refasten it.  And when she shut her eyes she felt those loosened strands playing against his cheeks.

In the keener press of such sensations she caught the smell of dust and a faint, wild, sweet tang on the air.  There was a low, rustling sigh of wind in the brush along the trail.  Suddenly the silence ripped apart to the sharp bark of a coyote, and then, from far away, came a long wail.  And then Majesty’s metal-rimmed hoof rang on a stone.

These later things lent probability to that ride for Madeline.  Otherwise it would have seemed like a dream.  Even so it was hard to believe.  Again she wondered if this woman who had begun to think and feel so much was Madeline Hammond.  Nothing had ever happened to her.  And here, playing about her like her hair played about Stewart’s face, was adventure, perhaps death, and surely life.