the passage of her body.  Then she stepped up on the sill and slipped through the aperture.  She saw no one.  Lightly she jumped down and ran in among the bushes.  But these did not afford her the cover she needed.  She stole from one clump to another, finding too late that she had chosen with poor judgment.  The position of the bushes had drawn her closer to the front of the house rather than away from it, and just before her were horses, and beyond a group of excited men.  With her heart in her throat Madeline crouched down.

A shrill yell, followed by running and mounting guerrillas, roused her hope.  They had sighted the cowboys and were in flight.  Rapid thumping of boots on the porch told of men hurrying from the house.  Several horses dashed past her, not ten feet distant.  One rider saw her, for he turned to shout back.  This drove Madeline into a panic.  Hardly knowing what she did, she began to run away from the house.  Her feet seemed leaden.  She felt the same horrible powerlessness that sometimes came over her when she dreamed of being pursued.  Horses with shouting riders streaked past her in the shrubbery.  There was a thunder of hoofs behind her.  She turned aside, but the thundering grew nearer.  She was being run down.

As Madeline shut her eyes and, staggering, was about to fall, apparently right under pounding hoofs, a rude, powerful hand clapped round her waist, clutched deep and strong, and swung her aloft.  She felt a heavy blow when the shoulder of the horse struck her, and then a wrenching of her arm as she was dragged up.  A sudden blighting pain made sight and feeling fade from her.

But she did not become unconscious to the extent that she lost the sense of being rapidly borne away.  She seemed to hold that for a long time.  When her faculties began to return the motion of the horse was no longer violent.  For a few moments she could not determine her position.  Apparently she was upside down.  Then she saw that she was facing the ground, and must be lying across a saddle with her head hanging down.  She could not move a hand; she could not tell where her hands were.  Then she felt the touch of soft leather.  She saw a high-topped Mexican boot, wearing a huge silver spur, and the reeking flank and legs of a horse, and a dusty, narrow trail.  Soon a kind of red darkness veiled her eyes, her head swam, and she felt motion and pain only dully.

After what seemed a thousand weary hours some one lifted her from the horse and laid her upon the ground, where, gradually, as the blood left her head and she could see, she began to get the right relation of things.