"I know. But I'll be uneasy until you return." "There's too much trouble in your face today for one of your years," he said, lifting her chin with rather a professional rebuke in his eyes. "You'll have to put it down, or it will make you old. Go right on dreaming and planning; things will come out exactly as you have designed." "Perhaps," she agreed, but with little hope in her voice. Slavens saddled his horse after they had refreshed themselves with coffee. Agnes stood by, racked with an anxiety which seemed to grind her heart. The physician thought of the pioneer women of his youth, of those who lived far out on the thin edge of prairie reaches, and in the gloom of forests which groaned around them in the lone winds of winter nights. There was the same melancholy of isolation in Agnes' eyes today as he had seen in theirs; the same sad hopelessness; the same hunger, and the longing to fly from the wilderness and its hardships, heart-weariness, and pain. Her hand lay appealingly upon his shoulder for a moment before he mounted, and her face was turned up to him, unspoken yearning on her lips. "Promise me again before you go that you will come back here before you relinquish your homestead to Boyle," she demanded. "Promise me that, no matter what the lawyer's opinion may be, you'll return here before you do anything else at all." "I promise you," said he. When he had ridden a little way he halted his horse and turned in his saddle to look back. She was sitting there in the sun, her head bowed, her hands clasped over her face, as if she wept or prayed. A little while he waited there, as if meditating a return, as if he had forgotten something--some solace, perhaps, for which her lips had appealed to his heart dumbly. Yet a sincere man seldom knows these things, which a trifler is so quick to see. He did not know, perhaps; or perhaps he was not certain enough to turn his horse and ride back to repair his omission. Presently he rode on slowly, his head bent, the bridle-reins loose in his hand. CHAPTER XVII A PLAN The man who had supplied the horse-blanket for covering the dead sheep-herder had taken it away, but the board upon which they had stretched him still lay under the tree where they had left it. There was blood on it where the wound had drained, a disturbing sight which persisted in meeting Agnes' eye every time she came out of the tent. She was debating in her mind whether to throw the board in the river or split it up and burn it in the stove, when Smith came along and claimed it. "Scarce as wood's goin' to be in this valley six months from now," Smith remarked, rubbing dust over the stain which did not appear to give him any qualms, "a man's got to take care of it. That's a shelf out of my store." "I don't suppose you'll ever put goods on it again." "Sure. Why not?" "Well, not groceries, at any rate," she ventured. "It won't hurt canned goods," Smith told her, turning it stain downward. "Doctor gone back?"