Presently she lost him, but faintly the wind swept back to her a haunting snatch of uncouth song: “Oh, bury me out on the lone prairee, In my narrow grave just six by three,” Were the words drifted to her by the wind. She thought it pathetically likely he might get the wish of his song. To Sheriff Forbes, dropping into the draw a few minutes later with his posse, Collins was a well of misinformation literally true. Yes, he had followed Miss Mackenzie’s trail into the hills and found her at a mountain ranch-house. She had been there a couple of days, and was about to set out for the Rocking Chair with the owner of the place, when he arrived and volunteered to see her as far as her uncle’s ranch. “I reckon there ain’t any use asking you if you seen anything of Wolf Leroy’s outfit,” said Forbes, a weather-beaten Westerner with a shrewd, wrinkled face. “No, I reckon there’s no use asking me that,” returned Collins, with a laugh that deceptively seemed to include the older man in the joke. “We’re after them for rustling a bunch of Circle 33 cows. Well, I’ll be moving. Glad you found the lady, Val. She don’t look none played out from her little trek across the desert. Funny, ain’t it, how she could have wandered that far and her afoot?” The Arizona sun was setting in its accustomed blaze of splendor, when Val Collins and Alice Mackenzie put their horses again toward the ranch and the rainbow-hued west. In his contented eyes were reflected the sunshine and a serenity born of life in the wide, open spaces. They rode in silence for long, the gentle evening breeze blowing in soughs. “Did you ever meet a man of such promises gone wrong so utterly? He might have been anything—and it has come to this, that he is hunted like a wild beast. I never saw anything so pitiful. I would give anything to save him.” He had no need to ask to whom she was referring. “Can’t be done. Good qualities bulge out all over him, but they don’t count for anything. ‘Unstable as water.’ That’s what’s the matter with him. He is the slave of his own whims. Hence he is only the splendid wreck of a man, full of all kinds of rich outcropping pay-ore that pinch out when you try to work them. They don’t raise men gamer, but that only makes him a more dangerous foe to society. Same with his loyalty and his brilliancy. He’s got a haid on him that works like they say old J. E. B. Stuart’s did. He would run into a hundred traps, but somehow he always worked his men out of them. That’s Leroy, too. If he had been an ordinary criminal he would have been rounded up years ago. It’s his audacity, his iron nerve, his good horse-sense judgment that saves his skin. But he’s certainly up against it at last.” “You think Sheriff Forbes will capture him?”