When morning came I told her I must go back on the trail.  “See, now, what this dog has done for us,” I said.  “The scratches on the ground of his little travois poles will make a trail easy to be followed.  I must take him with me and run back the trail.  For you, stay here by the water and no matter what your fears, do not move from here in any case, even if I should not be back by night.”

“But what if you should not come back!” she said, her terror showing in her eyes.

“But I will come back,” I replied.  “I will never leave you.  I would rise from my grave to come back to you.  But the time has not yet come to lie down and die.  Be strong.  We shall yet be safe.”

So I was obliged to turn and leave her sitting alone there, the gray sweep of the merciless Plains all about her.  Another woman would have gone mad.

But it was as I said.  This dog was our savior.  Without his nose I could not have traced out the little travois trail; but he, seeing what was needed, and finding me nosing along and doubling back and seeking on the hard ground, seemed to know what was required, or perhaps himself thought to go back to some old camp for food.  So presently he trotted along, his ears up, his nose straight ahead; and I, a savage, depended upon a creature still a little lower in the order of life, and that creature proved a faithful servant.

We went on at a swinging walk, or trot, or lope, as the ground said, and ate up the distance at twice the speed we had used the day before.  In a couple of hours I was close to where she had taken the belt, and so at last I saw the dog drop his nose and sniff.  There were the missing riches, priceless beyond gold—­the little leaden balls, the powder, dry in its horn, the little rolls of tow, the knife swung at the girdle!  I knelt down there on the sand, I, John Cowles, once civilized and now heathen, and I raised my frayed and ragged hands toward the Mystery, and begged that I might be forever free of the great crime of thanklessness.  Then, laughing at the dog, and loping on tireless as when I was a boy, I ran as though sickness and weakness had never been mine, and presently came back to the place where I had left her.

She saw me coming.  She ran out to meet me, holding out her arms....  I say she came, holding out her arms to me.

“Sit down here by my side,” I commanded her.  “I must talk to you.  I will—­I will.”

“Do not,” she implored of me, seeing what was in my mind.  “Ah, what shall I do!  You are not fair!”

But I took her hands in mine.  “I can endure it no longer,” I said.  “I will not endure it.”

She looked at me with her eyes wide—­looked me full in the face with such a gaze as I have never seen on any woman’s face.

“I love you,” I said to her.  “I have never loved any one else.  I can never love any one again but you.”  I say that I, John Cowles, had at that moment utterly forgotten all of life and all of the world except this, then and there.  “I love you!” I said, over and over again to her.