Away back in his mind, too, there might have been a chivalrous desire to help her in the fight that was to come with Alva Dale.  He had felt his blood surge hotly at the prospect of a fight, with Mary Bransford as the storm center; a passion to defend her had got into his soul; and a hatred for Alva Dale had gripped him.

Whatever the motive, he had come, and since he had looked down into William Bransford’s face, he had become conscious of a mighty satisfaction.  The two men who had trailed Bransford had been cold-blooded murderers, and he had avenged Bransford completely.  That could not have happened if he had not yielded to the impulse to go to the Double A.

He was glad he had decided to go.  He was now the bearer of ill news, but he was convinced that the girl would want to know about her brother—­and he must tell her.  And now, too, he was convinced that his journey to the Double A had been previously arranged—­by Fate, or whatever Providence controls the destinies of humans.

And that conviction helped him to fight down the sense of guilty embarrassment that had afflicted him until now—­the knowledge that he was deliberately and unwarrantedly going to the Double A to interfere, to throw himself into a fight with persons with whom he had no previous acquaintance, for no other reason than that his chivalrous instincts had prompted him.

And yet his thoughts were not entirely serious as he rode.  The situation had its humorous side.

“Mostly nothin’ turns out as folks figure in the beginnin’,” he told himself.  “Otherwise everything would be cut an’ dried, an’ there wouldn’t be a heap of fun in the world—­for butters-in.  An’ folks which scheme an’ plot, tryin’ to get things that belong to other folks, would have it too easy.  There’s got to be folks that wander around, nosin’ into places that they shouldn’t.  Eh, Streak?”

Streak did not answer, and Sanderson rode on, smiling gravely.

He made a dry camp that night in a sea of mesquite at the edge of a sand plain, although, he knew he could not now be far from the Double A range.  And in the early light of the morning he found his judgment vindicated, for stretching before him, still in a northeasterly direction, he saw a great, green-brown level sweeping away from his feet and melting into some rimming mountains—­a vast, natural basin of gigantic proportions.

Sanderson was almost at the end of his journey, it was early morning, and he was in no hurry.  He leisurely prepared his breakfast, sitting on a flat rock as he ate, and scanning the basin.

Mere bigness had never impressed Sanderson; the West had shown him greater vistas than this mammoth basin.  And yet his eyes glowed as he looked out and down at the country that lay, slumbering in the pure white light of the dawn.

He saw, dotting the floor of the basin, the roofs of houses.  From his height they seemed to be close together, but Sanderson was not misled, and he knew that they were separated by miles of virgin soil—­of sagebrush and yucca, and soapweed and other desert weeds that needed not the magic of water to make them live.