McGuire jerked his sombrero low over his eyes.

“You think it’s as bad as that?” he growled, glaring at her.

“I swear it is!”

He considered another moment.  Then:  “You’ll have to excuse me, Miss Jordan.  But I’m so plumb tired out I can’t hold up my end of this talk no longer!”

So saying, he dropped his head on both his doubled fists, and she lost sight of his face.  It had come so inconceivably easily, this triumph, that she was too dazed to move, for a moment.  Then she turned and fairly raced for the corral.  It had all been the result of the first smile with which she went to McGuire, she felt.  And as she saddled her bay in a shed a moment later she was blessing the power of laughter.  It had given her the horse.  It had let her pass through the bars.  It placed her on the open road where she fled away at a swift gallop, only looking back, as she reached the top of the first hill, to see McGuire still seated on the stump, but now his head was canted far to one side, and she had no doubt that he must be asleep in very fact.

Then the hill rose behind her, shutting out the ranch, and she turned to settle to her work.  Never in her life—­and she had ridden cross-country on blood horses in the East—­had she ridden as she rode on this day!  She was striking on a straight line over hill and dale, through the midst of barbed wire.  But the wire halted her only for short checks.  The swift snipping of the pair of pliers which was ever in her saddle bag cleared the way, and as the lengths of wire snapped humming back, coiling like snakes, she rode through and headed into the next field at a renewed gallop.  She was leaving behind her a day’s work for half a dozen men, but she would have sacrificed ten times the value of the whole ranch to gain another half hour of precious time.

For when she broke down the last of the small fenced fields the sun was already down.  And when twilight came, she knew by instinct, the blow would fall.  Yet the distance to the shack was still terribly far.

She straightened the gallant little bay to her work, but at every stride she moaned.  Oh for such legs beneath her as the legs of Lady Mary, stretching swiftly and easily over the ground!  But this chopping, laboring stride—!  She struck her hand against her forehead and then spurred mercilessly.  As a result, the bay merely tossed her head, for she was already drawn straight as a string by the effort of her gallop.  And Marianne had to sit back in the saddle and simply pray for time, while the little thirty-two revolver in the saddle holster before her, flapped monotonously, beating out the rhythm of every stride.

And the night rode over the mountains with mysterious speed.  It seemed to her frantic brain that the gap between crimson sunset and pallid twilight could have been spanned by a scant five minutes.  And now, when she found herself at the foot of the last slope, it was the utter dark, and above her head the white stars were rushing past the treetops.  The slope was killing the mare.  She fell from her labored gallop to a trot, from the trot to a shambling jog, and then to a walk.  And all the time Marianne found herself listening with desperate intensity for the report of a gun out of the woods ahead!