“All right, Nels, old friend, and thanks,” replied Stewart.  Nels returned to the camp-fire, and Stewart resumed his silent guard.

Madeline led Castleton away from the brink of the wall.

“By Jove!  Cowboys are blooming strange folk!” he exclaimed.  “They are not what they pretend to be.”

“Indeed, you are right,” replied Madeline.  “I cannot understand them.  Come, let us tell the others that Nels and Monty were only talking and do not intend to leave us.  Dorothy, at least, will be less frightened if she knows.”

Dorothy was somewhat comforted.  The others, however, complained of the cowboys’ singular behavior.  More than once the idea was advanced that an elaborate trick had been concocted.  Upon general discussion this idea gained ground.  Madeline did not combat it, because she saw it tended to a less perturbed condition of mind among her guests.  Castleton for once proved that he was not absolutely obtuse, and helped along the idea.

They sat talking in low voices until a late hour.  The incident now began to take on the nature of Helen’s long-yearned-for adventure.  Some of the party even grew merry in a subdued way.  Then, gradually, one by one they tired and went to bed.  Helen vowed she could not sleep in a place where there were bats and crawling things.  Madeline fancied, however, that they all went to sleep while she lay wide-eyed, staring up at the black bulge of overhanging rock and beyond the starry sky.

To keep from thinking of Stewart and the burning anger he had caused her to feel for herself, Madeline tried to keep her mind on other things.  But thought of him recurred, and each time there was a hot commotion in her breast hard to stifle.  Intelligent reasoning seemed out of her power.  In the daylight it had been possible for her to be oblivious to Stewart’s deceit after the moment of its realization.  At night, however, in the strange silence and hovering shadows of gloom, with the speaking stars seeming to call to her, with the moan of the wind in the pines, and the melancholy mourn of coyotes in the distance, she was not able to govern her thought and emotion.  The day was practical, cold; the night was strange and tense.  In the darkness she had fancies wholly unknown to her in the bright light of the sun.  She battled with a haunting thought.  She had inadvertently heard Nels’s conversation with Stewart; she had listened, hoping to hear some good news or to hear the worst; she had learned both, and, moreover, enlightenment on one point of Stewart’s complex motives.  He wished to spare her any sight that might offend, frighten, or disgust her.  Yet this Stewart, who showed a fineness of feeling that might have been wanting even in Boyd Harvey, maintained a secret rendezvous with that pretty, abandoned Bonita.  Here always the hot shame, like a live, stinging, internal fire, abruptly ended Madeline’s thought.  It was intolerable, and it was the more so because she could neither control nor understand it.  The hours wore on, and at length, as the stars began to pale and there was no sound whatever, she fell asleep.