They were quiet now beyond any chance of farther runaway, even had it been possible.  Margaret dropped the lines on the dashboard and began to sob, at first in slow deep breaths and then in quicker uneven ones.  Plucky as she was, the girl had had about all her nerves could stand for one day.  The strain of her preparation for flight, the long night drive, and the excitement of the last two hours were telling on her in a hysterical reaction.

She wept herself out, dried her eyes with dabs of her little kerchief, and came back to a calm consideration of her situation.  She must get back to Fort Lincoln as soon as possible, and she must do it without encountering the convict.  For in the course of the runaway the revolver had been jolted from the trap.

Not quite sure in which direction lay the road, she got out from the trap, topped the hill to her right, and looked around.  She saw in all directions nothing but rolling hilltops, merging into each other even to the horizon’s edge.  In her wild flight among these hills she had lost count of direction.  She had not yet learned how to know north from south by the sun, and if she had it would have helped but little since she knew only vaguely the general line of their travel.

She felt sure that from the top of the next rise she could locate the road, but once there she was as uncertain as before.  Before giving up she breasted a third hill to the summit.  Still no signs of the road.  Reluctantly she retraced her steps, and at the foot of the hill was uncertain whether she should turn to right or left.  Choosing the left, from the next height she could see nothing of the team.  She was not yet alarmed.  It was ridiculous to suppose that she was lost.  How could she be when she was within three or four hundred yards of the rig?  She would cut across the shoulder into the wash and climb the hillock beyond.  For behind it the team must certainly be.

But at her journey’s end her eyes were gladdened by no sight of the horses.  Every draw was like its neighbor, every rolling rise a replica of the next.  The truth came home to a sinking heart.  She was lost in one of the great deserts of Texas.  She would wander for days as others had, and she would die in the end of starvation and thirst.  Nobody would know where to look for her, since she had told none where she was going.  Only yesterday at her boarding-house she had heard a young man tell how a tenderfoot had been found dead after he had wandered round and round in intersecting circles.  She sank down and gave herself up to despair.

But not for long.  She was too full of grit to give up without a long fight.  How many hours she wandered Margaret Kinney did not know.  The sun was high in the heavens when she began.  It had given place to flooding moonlight long before her worn feet and aching heart gave up the search for some human landmark.  Once at least she must have slept, for she stared up from a spot where she had sunk down to look up into a starry sky that was new to her.