Slone gathered up the packages of supplies, and without looking at the men he hurried away.  He seemed possessed of a fury to turn and run back.  Some force, like an invisible hand, withheld him.  When he reached the cabin he shut himself in, and lay on his bunk, forgetting that the place did not belong to him, alive only to the mystery of his trouble, smarting with the shame of the assault upon him.  It was dark before he composed himself and went out, and then he had not the desire to eat.  He made no move to open the supplies of food, did not even make a light.  But he went out to take grass and water to the horses.  When he returned to the cabin a man was standing at the porch.  Slone recognized Holley’s shape and then his voice.

“Son, you raised the devil to-day.”

“Holley, don’t you go back on me!” cried Slone.  “I was driven!”

“Don’t talk so loud,” whispered the rider in return.  “I’ve only a minnit. . . .  Here—­a letter from Lucy. . . .  An’, son, don’t git the idee thet I’ll go back on you.”

Slone took the letter with trembling fingers.  All the fury and gloom instantly fled.  Lucy had written him!  He could not speak.

“Son, I’m double-crossin’ the boss, right this minnit!” whispered Holley, hoarsely.  “An’ the same time I’m playin’ Lucy’s game.  If Bostil finds out he’ll kill me.  I mustn’t be ketched up here.  But I won’t lose track of you—­wherever you go.”

Holley slipped away stealthily in the dusk, leaving Slone with a throbbing heart.

“Wherever you go!” he echoed.  “Ah!  I forgot!  I can’t stay here.”

Lucy’s letter made his fingers tingle—­made them so hasty and awkward that he had difficulty in kindling blaze enough to see to read.  The letter was short, written in lead-pencil on the torn leaf of a ledger.  Slone could not read rapidly—­those years on the desert had seen to that—­and his haste to learn what Lucy said bewildered him.  At first all the words blurred: 

“Come at once to the bench in the cottonwoods.  I’ll meet you there.  My heart is breaking.  It’s a lie—­a lie—­what they say.  I’ll swear you were with me the night the boat was cut adrift.  I know you didn’t do that.  I know who. . . .  Oh, come!  I will stick to you.  I will run off with you.  I love you!”

CHAPTER XV

Slone’s heart leaped to his throat, and its beating choked his utterances of rapture and amaze and dread.  But rapture dominated the other emotions.  He could scarcely control the impulse to run to meet Lucy, without a single cautious thought.

He put the precious letter inside his blouse, where it seemed to warm his breast.  He buckled on his gun-belt, and, extinguishing the light, he hurried out.

A crescent moon had just tipped the bluff.  The village lanes and cabins and trees lay silver in the moon-light.  A lonesome coyote barked in the distance.  All else was still.  The air was cool, sweet, fragrant.  There appeared to be a glamour of light, of silence, of beauty over the desert.