“Judith, dear, has it come to this, that you not only distrust an old friend, but that you try to degrade yourself to hide from him the fact that you are going to your brother’s?  You’ve never spoken to Lorimer.  I heard him say, not a week ago, that he had never succeeded in making you recognize him.  You deceived me at first when you spoke of meeting him—­I thought you had a message from Jim—­but this talk of merrymaking is beneath you.”  He shrugged his shoulders in disgust.  He felt the torrent of grief that rent her.  No sob escaped her lips; there was no convulsive movement of shoulder.  She rode beside him, still as the desert before the sand-storm breaks, her soul seared with white-hot iron that knows no saving grace of sob or tear.  She rode as Boadicea might have ridden to battle; there was not a yielding line in her body.  But over and over in her woman’s heart there rang the cry:  “I am so tired!  If the long night would but come!”

Peter drew out his watch.  “It’s a quarter to eleven.  We’ll have a hard bit of riding to reach Blind Creek before midnight.”

Then he knew as well as she, perhaps better, the route to Jim’s hiding-place; she had never been there as yet.  And if Peter knew, doubtless every cattle-man in the country knew.  What a fool she had been with her talk of meeting Tom Lorimer!  A sense of utter defeat seemed to paralyze her energies.  She felt like a trapped thing that after eluding its pursuers again and again finds that it has been but running about a corral.  Physical weariness was telling on her.  She had been in the saddle since a little past noon and it was now not far from midnight.  And still there was the unanswered question of Peter’s errand.  It was long since either had broken the silence.  A delicious coolness had crept into the air with the approach of midnight.  Judith, breathing deep draughts of it, reminded herself of the stoicism that was hers by birthright.

“Peter”—­her voice lost some of its old ring, but it had a deeper note—­“Peter, we make strange comrades, you and I, in a stranger world.  We meet on Horse-Thief Trail, and there is reason to suppose that our errands are inimical.  You’ve pierced all my little pretences; you know that I am going to my brother, who is an outlaw—­my brother, the rope for whose hanging is already cut.  And yet we have been friends these many years, and we meet in this world of desolation and weigh each other’s words, and there is no trust in our hearts.  Our little faith is more pitiful than the cruel errands that bring us.  I take it you, too, are going to my brother’s?”

“I’m going there to see that you arrive safe and sound, but I had no intention of going when I left camp.  You’ve brought me a good twenty miles out of my way, not to mention accusing me of ulterior motives.  Now, aren’t you penitent?” He smiled at her, boyish and irresistible.  To Judith it was more reassuring than an oath.  “It’s like dogs fighting over a picked bone; the meat’s