She had lifted from the floor the stick with its leathern thong with which the man had castigated the tender body of his motherless child.  She held it in her hand, looking at it with the angry aversion that she might have turned upon a venomous serpent.  Then slowly, with unspeakable rebuke, she swung her gaze upon the wretch in the chair.  For a moment she silently accused him.  Then he dropped his head in his hands and sobbed.  He seemed in his voiceless way to say that he, too, had been castigated by a million invisible thongs held in dead men’s hands, and that his soul, like his child’s body, was hideous with welts.

Kate turned to Ray.

“Is the patrol wagon on its way?” she inquired.

“I—­I—­didn’t call it,” he stammered.

“Please do,” she said simply.

He went out of the room, silently raging, and was grateful that one of the men followed to show him the patrol box.  He waited outside for the wagon to come, and when the officers brought out the shaking prisoner, he saw Kate with them carrying the child in her arms.

“I must go to the station,” she said to Ray, in a matter-of-fact tone that put him far away from her.  “So I’ll say good-night.  It wouldn’t be pleasant for you to ride in the wagon, you know.  I’ll be quite all right.  One of the officers will see me safe home.  Anyway, I shall have to go to the dance-hall before the evening’s over.”

“Kate!” he protested.

“Oh, I know,” she said to him apart softly while the others concerned themselves with assisting the blubbering Huniack into the wagon, “you think it isn’t nice of me to be going around like this, saving babies from beatings and young girls from much worse.  You think it isn’t ladylike.  But it’s what the coming lady is either going to do or see done.  It’s a new idea, you understand, Ray.  Quite different from the squaw idea, isn’t it?  Good-night!”

An officer stood at the door of the wagon waiting for her.  He touched his hat and smiled at her in a comradely fashion, and she responded with as courteous a bow as she ever had made to Ray.

The wagon drove off.

“I’ve been given my answer,” said Ray aloud.  He wondered if he were more relieved or disappointed at the outcome.  But really he could neither feel nor think reasonably.  He went home in a tumult, dismayed at his own sufferings, and in no condition to realize that the old ideas and the new were at death grips in his consciousness.

XXVI

Karl Wander rode wearily up the hill on his black mare.  Honora saw him coming and waved to him from the window.  There was no one to put up his horse, and he drove her into the stables and fed her and spread her bed while Honora watched what he and she had laughingly termed “the outposts.”  For she believed she had need to be on guard, and she thanked heaven that all of the approaches to the house were in the open and that there was nothing nearer than the rather remote grove of pinon trees which could shelter any creeping enemy.