There was nothing to be seen.  A hope which had risen for a moment in her breast, at thought of possible deliverance, sank down in collapse, and left her more faint than before.  The sun was at the very rim of the world.  Its edge began to melt its way downward into all the solid bulk of mountains.  It would soon be gone.  Darkness would ensue.  The moon would be very late, if indeed it came at all.  Wild animals would issue from their dens of hiding, to prowl in search of food.  Perhaps the sound she heard had been made by an early night-brute of the desert, already roving for his prey!

Once more she went on, desperately, almost blindly.  To keep on going, that was the one essential!  She had proceeded no more than a few rods, however, when she heard that sound again—­this time more like a shout.

Her heart pounded heavily and rapidly.  She shaded her eyes with her hand, against the last, slanted sun-rays, and fancied she discerned something, far off there westward, in the purples flung eastward by the mountains.  Then the last bit of all that molten disk of gold disappeared in the summits, and with its going she beheld a horseman, riding at a gallop towards herself.

The relief she felt was almost overwhelming—­till thoughts of such an encounter came to modify her joy.  She was only an unprotected girl—­yet—­she had no appearance of a woman!  This must be her safeguard, should this man now approaching prove some rough, lawless being of the mines.

She stood perfectly still and waited.  A man would have hurried forward to meet this deliverance, so unexpectedly vouchsafed.  But she was too excited, too uncertain—­too much of a girl.  Then presently, when the horseman was still a hundred yards away, her heart abruptly turned over in her bosom.

The man on the horse was Van.  She knew him—­knew that impudent pose, that careless grace and oneness with his broncho!  She did not know he was chasing that flying roof which had frightened her horse from her side; that he had bought an old cabin, far from his claim, to move it to the “Laughing Water” ground—­only to see it wrenched from his hold by the mighty gale and flung across the world.  She knew nothing of this, but she suddenly knew how glad was her whole tingling being, how bounding was the blood in her veins!  And she also knew, abruptly, that now if ever she must play the man.  She had all but forgotten she was angry with Van.  That, and a hundred reasons more, made it absolutely imperative now that he should not know her for herself!

She made a somewhat wild attempt at a toilet of her hair—­in case the wind had ripped the tell-tale strands from beneath her hat.  Then with utter faintness in her being, and weakness in her knees, she prepared to give him reception.

He had slowed his horse to a walk.  He rode up deliberately, scrutinizing in obvious puzzlement the figure before him in the sand.