desert, in its desolation, knows.  To Judith, with a soul attuned to every passing expression of nature, there was significance in this transition from darkness to light.  The sudden radiance was emblematic of her belated perception, coming as it did after a blindness so dense as to appear almost wilful.  Her mind was busy with a multitude of schemes.  Fool though she had been, she would not be the instrument of her brother’s undoing.

“I’ve come too far,” she cried, in sudden dismay.  “I should have stopped at the foot of the divide.  I’ve never been over the trail before.”

“You foolish child, why should you stop in the middle of the wilderness?”

She wheeled the mare about and faced him, a figure of graven resolution.

“I promised to meet Tom Lorimer there—­now you know.”

With which she cracked Dolly sharply with her heel and began to retrace her way over the trail.  Peter turned his horse and followed, with the feeling of utter helplessness that a man has when confronted with the granite obstinacy of women.  Judith had meanwhile expected that the announcement of her mythical appointment with Tom Lorimer would be received differently.  Tom Lorimer’s reputation was of the worst.  An Eastern man formerly, an absconder from justice, rumor was busy with tales of ungodly merrymaking that went on at his ranch, where no woman went except painted wisps from the dance-halls.  But Peter was too loyal a friend, despite his shortcomings as a lover, to see in Judith’s statement anything more than a sisterly devotion so deeply unselfish that it failed to take into account the danger to which she subjected herself.

However, it was plainly his duty to prevent an unprotected rendezvous with Lorimer, to reason, to plead, and, if he should fail to bring her to a reasonable frame of mind, to go with her, come what would of the result.  There were reasons innumerable why he, a cattle-man, should avoid the appearance of dealing with the sheep faction, he reflected, grimly.  Lorimer owned sheep, many thousand head.  His herds had been allowed to graze unmolested, while smaller owners, like Jim Rodney, had been crowded out because his influence, politically, was a thing to be reckoned with.  So Peter followed Judith, pleading Judith’s cause; she did not understand, he told her, what she was doing; and while perhaps there was not another man in the country who would not honor her unselfishness in coming to him, Lorimer’s chivalry was not a thing to be reckoned with, drunken beast that he was.  And Judith, worn with the struggle, tried beyond measure, made reckless by the daily infusion of ill-fortune, pulled up the mare and laughed unpleasantly.

“You think I’m going to see Lorimer about Jim?  I’m going with him to a merrymaking.  We’re old pals, Lorimer and I.”