Lower and lower sank Rowland’s great chin onto his breast.

“They separated,” impassively.  “Part went south to Sioux City; part west toward Yankton.”  Involuntarily his lips pursed in the inevitable contempt of a strong man for one hopelessly weak.  “You’d better take a lunch along.  It’s something of a journey to either place.”

Swift as the suggestion, Mrs. Rowland, with the spontaneous hospitality of the frontier, was upon her feet.  Into a quaint Indian basket of coloured rushes went a roast grouse, barely touched, from the table.  A loaf of bread followed:  a bottle of water from the wooden pail in the corner.  “You’re welcome, friend,” she proffered.

Hans Mueller hesitated, accepted.  A swift moisture dimmed his eyes.

“Thanks, lady,” he halted.  “You’re good people, anyway.  I’m sorry—­” He lifted his battered hat, shuffled anew toward the doorway.  “Good-bye.”

Impassive as before, Rowland returned to his neglected dinner.

“No wonder the Sioux play us whites for cowards, and think we’ll run at sight of them,” he commented.

Mrs. Rowland, standing motionless in the single exit through which Mueller had gone, did not answer.

“Better come and finish, Margaret,” suggested her husband.

Again there was no answer, and Rowland, after eating a few mouthfuls, pushed back his chair.  Even then she did not speak, and, rising, the man made his way across the room to put an arm with rough affection around his wife’s waist.

“Are you, too, scared at last?” he voiced gently.

The woman turned swiftly and, in action almost unbelievable after her former unemotional certainty, dropped her head to his shoulder.

“Yes, I think I am a bit, Sam.  For baby’s sake I wish we’d gone too; but now,”—­her arms crept around his neck, closed,—­“but now—­now it’s too late!”

For a long minute, and another, the man did not stir but involuntarily his arms had tightened until, had she wished, the woman could not have turned.  He had been looking absently out the door, south over the rolling country leading to the deserted settlement.

In the distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, Hans Mueller was still in sight, skirting the base of a sharp incline.  Through the trembling heat waves he seemed a mere moving dark spot; like an ant or a spider on its zigzag journey.  The grass at the base of the rise was rank and heavy, reaching almost to the waist of the moving figure.  Rowland watched it all absently, meditatively; as he would have watched the movement of a coyote or a prairie owl, for the simple reason that it was the only visible object endowed with life, and instinctively life responds to life.  The words of his wife just spoken, “It is too late,” with the revelation they bore, were echoing in his brain.  For the first time, to his mind came a vague unformed suggestion, not of fear, but near akin, as to this lonely prairie wilderness,