At first she just sat empty of sensation except for the shock of those faint thuds of sound.  Then her heart began to beat to bursting; with dread, with a suffocation of suspense.  She got up, quiet as a thief.  The horse stopped.  There came a step, rapid and eager.  She fled like a furtive shadow into the house, fell on her knees there by the hearth, and hid her face against the big hide-covered chair.  Her eyes were full of cold tears.  Her finger-tips were ice.  She was shaking—­shuddering, rather—­from head to foot.  The steps had come close, had struck the threshold.  There they stopped.  After a pause, which her pulses filled with shaken rhythm, her name was spoken—­So long it had been since she had heard it that it fell on her ear like a foreign speech.

“Sheila!  Sheila!”

She lifted her head sharply.  It was not Hilliard’s voice.

“Sheila—­” There was such an agony of fear in the softly spoken syllables, there was such a weight of dread on the breath of the speaker, that, for very pity, Sheila forgot herself.  She got up from the floor and moved dazedly to meet the figure on the threshold.  It was dimly outlined against the violet evening light.  Sheila came up quite close and put her hands on the tense, hanging arms.  They caught her.  Then she sobbed and laughed aloud, calling out in her astonishment again and again, softly, incredulously—­

“You, Dickie?  Oh, Dickie, Dickie, it’s—­you?”

CHAPTER XIV

SHEILA AND THE STARS

Hilliard’s first messenger had been hindered by death.  Several times it seemed that his second messenger would suffer the same grim prevention.  But this second messenger was young and set like steel to his purpose.  He left the railroad at Millings, hired a horse, crossed the great plain above the town and braved the Pass, dangerous with overbalanced weights of melting snow.  There, on the lonely Hill, he had his first encounter with that Arch-Hinderer.  A snow-slide caught him and he left his horse buried, struggling out himself from the cold smother like a maimed insect to lie for hours by the road till breath and life came back to him.  He got himself on foot to the nearest ranch, and there he hired a fresh horse and reached Rusty, at the end of the third day.

Rusty was overshadowed by a tragedy.  The body of the trapper, Hilliard’s first messenger, had been found under the melting snow, a few days before, and to the white-faced young stranger was given that stained and withered letter in which Hilliard had excused and explained his desertion.

Nothing, at Rusty, had been heard of Sheila.  No one knew even that she had ever left Miss Blake’s ranch—­the history of such lonely places is a sealed book from snowfall until spring.  Their tragedies are as dumb as the tragedies of animal life.  No one had ever connected Sheila’s name with Hilliard’s.  No one knew of his plans for her.  The trapper had set off without delay, not even going back to his house, some little distance outside of Rusty, to tell his wife that he would be bringing home a lodger with him.  There was, to be sure, at the office a small bundle of letters all in the same hand addressed to Miss Arundel.  They had to wait, perforce, till the snow-bound country was released.