a psalm.  Peter’s voice gave it to the mountains joyously, but the mountains gave it back in the minor.  And Judith was reminded of the soft, singing syllables that her mother, in the Indian way, had made of her daughter’s Indian name.  The remembrance tugged at her heart.  In her joy at seeing Peter she had forgotten that the errand that had brought her was an errand of life and death—­life and death for her brother!

But Peter’s ready enthusiasms pressed him hard.  Surely love-making was the business of such a night.  “Ah, Judith, goddess of the heights, if I could sing your name like the mountains, would you love me a little?”

For his pains he had a flash of white teeth in a smile that recalled his first acquaintance with Kitty, the sort of smile one would give to a “nice boy” when his manoeuvres were a trifle obvious.  “Not if you sang my name as the chorus of all the Himalayas and the Rockies and Andes, and with the fire of all their volcanoes and the beauty of their snows and the strength of all their hills, for it’s not my way to love a little!”

He bent towards her; to brush her cheek lightly as they rode was but to imply his appreciation of the scene as a bit of chiaroscuro, the panorama of the desert night, eternal romance typified by the man and woman scaling the heights, the goddess of love lighting them on their way by her flaming torch.  But Judith, who said little because she felt much, was in no mood to brook such dalliance, and, urging the mare sharply, she cantered down the divide at peril of life and limb.  Peter, cursing the heavy-footed beast he rode, came stumbling after.

Judith rode wildly through the night, leaving Peter laps behind, to beseech, to prophesy dire happening if she should slip, and to scramble after, as best he might, on the heavy-footed beast he repudiated, with all his ancestors, as oxen, to the fourth generation.  But the woman kept her pace.  She had stern questions to put to herself, and they were likely to have truer answers if Peter were elsewhere than riding beside her.  Whither was he going?  They had met casually on a trail known to few honest men.  It led over a spur of the Wind River to a sort of no man’s land, the hiding-place of horse and cattle thieves.  She had gone to warn her brother.  Could he be going there—­She could not bring herself to finish.

Her heart was divided against itself.  Within it were fought again the red and the white man’s battles, bitterly, and to the finish.  And now the white man, with his open warfare, won, and all her love rose up and scourged her little faith.  She would wait on the trail for Peter, penitent and ashamed.  And while she waited suspicions bred of her Indian blood stirred distrustfully, and she told herself that her mother’s daughter made a worthy champion of the ways of white men.  Did Hamilton hunt her brother gallowsward, making merry with her the meantime?  He had not even been courteously concerned as to where she was going when they met on