For the girl’s few words, the look of her eyes, the prayer, had strangely touched Venters.

“She was only a girl,” he soliloquized.  “What was she to Oldring?  Rustlers don’t have wives nor sisters nor daughters.  She was bad—­that’s all.  But somehow...well, she may not have willingly become the companion of rustlers.  That prayer of hers to God for mercy!...Life is strange and cruel.  I wonder if other members of Oldring’s gang are women?  Likely enough.  But what was his game?  Oldring’s Mask Rider!  A name to make villagers hide and lock their doors.  A name credited with a dozen murders, a hundred forays, and a thousand stealings of cattle.  What part did the girl have in this?  It may have served Oldring to create mystery.”

Hours passed.  The white stars moved across the narrow strip of dark-blue sky above.  The silence awoke to the low hum of insects.  Venters watched the immovable white face, and as he watched, hour by hour waiting for death, the infamy of her passed from his mind.  He thought only of the sadness, the truth of the moment.  Whoever she was—­whatever she had done—­she was young and she was dying.

The after-part of the night wore on interminably.  The starlight failed and the gloom blackened to the darkest hour.  “She’ll die at the gray of dawn,” muttered Venters, remembering some old woman’s fancy.  The blackness paled to gray, and the gray lightened and day peeped over the eastern rim.  Venters listened at the breast of the girl.  She still lived.  Did he only imagine that her heart beat stronger, ever so slightly, but stronger?  He pressed his ear closer to her breast.  And he rose with his own pulse quickening.

“If she doesn’t die soon—­she’s got a chance—­the barest chance to live,” he said.

He wondered if the internal bleeding had ceased.  There was no more film of blood upon her lips.  But no corpse could have been whiter.  Opening her blouse, he untied the scarf, and carefully picked away the sage leaves from the wound in her shoulder.  It had closed.  Lifting her lightly, he ascertained that the same was true of the hole where the bullet had come out.  He reflected on the fact that clean wounds closed quickly in the healing upland air.  He recalled instances of riders who had been cut and shot apparently to fatal issues; yet the blood had clotted, the wounds closed, and they had recovered.  He had no way to tell if internal hemorrhage still went on, but he believed that it had stopped.  Otherwise she would surely not have lived so long.  He marked the entrance of the bullet, and concluded that it had just touched the upper lobe of her lung.  Perhaps the wound in the lung had also closed.  As he began to wash the blood stains from her breast and carefully rebandage the wound, he was vaguely conscious of a strange, grave happiness in the thought that she might live.