It may be conceived with what anxiety Bucky listened to the whispered conversation and waited for the decision of the governor. He was a game man, noted even in a country famous for its courageous citizens, but he felt strangely weak now as he waited with that leather-crusted face of his bereft of all expression. “Give him till morning to weaken. If he still stays obstinate, hang him in the dawn,” decided the governor, his beady eyes fixed on the prisoner. Not a flicker of the eyelid betrayed the Arizonian’s emotion, but for an instant the world swam dizzily before him. Safe till morning! Before then a hundred chances might change the current of the game in his favor. How brightly the sunshine flooded the room! What a glorious world it was, after all! Through the open window poured the rich, full-throated song of a meadow lark, and the burden of its blithe song was, “How good is this life the mere living.” CHAPTER XIII. BUCKY’S FIRST-RATE REASONS How long Frances Mackenzie gave herself up to despair she never knew, but when at last she resolutely took herself in hand it seemed hours later. “Bucky told me to be brave, he told me not to lose my nerve,” she repeated to herself over and over again, drawing comfort from the memory of his warm, vibrant voice. “He said he would come back, and he hates a liar. So, of course, he will come.” With such argument she tried to allay her wild fears. But on top of all her reassurances would come a swift, blinding vision of gallant Bucky being led to his death that crumpled her courage as a hammer might an empty egg shell. What was the use of her pretending all was well when at that very moment they might be murdering him? Then in her agony she would pace up and down, wringing her hands, or would beat them on the stone walls till the soft flesh was bruised and bleeding. It was in the reaction, after one of these paroxysms of despair, that in her groping for an anchor to make fast her courage she thought of his letter. “He said in three hours I was to read it if he didn’t come back. It must be more than three hours now,” she said aloud to herself, and knew a fresh dread at his prolonged absence beyond the limit he had set. In point of fact, he had been gone less than three-quarters of an hour, but in each one of them she had lived a lifetime of pain and died many deaths.