Certain she was that he could not have obtained them in a manner to wrong anybody else. He spoke of them as "the loot of old Don Milo Morales' _hacienda_"; but Frances knew well enough that her good father, Captain Dan Rugley, had been no land pirate, no so-called Border ruffian, who had robbed some peaceful Spanish ranch-owner across the Rio Grande of his possessions. Frances was a bit worried to-night. There were two topics of thought that disturbed her. Motherless, and with few female friends even, she had been shut away with her own girlish thoughts and fears and wonderings more than most girls of her age. Life was a mystery to her. She lived in books and in romances and in imagination's pictures more than she did in the workaday world about her. There seems to be little romance attached to the everyday lives we live, no matter how we are situated. The most dreary and uncolored existence, in all probability, there is in the world to-day is the daily life of a real prince or princess. We look longingly over the fence of our desires and consider all sorts and conditions of people outside as happier and far better off than we. That was the way it was with Frances. Especially on this particular night. Her unexpected meeting with Pratt Sanderson had brought to her heart and mind more strongly than for months her experiences in Amarillo. She remembered her school days, her school fellows, and the difference between their lives and that which she lived at present. Probably half the girls she had known at school would be delighted (or thought they would) to change places with Frances of the ranges, right then. But the ranch girl thought how much better off she would be if she were continuing her education under the care of people who could place her in a more cultivated life. Not that she was disloyal, even in thought, to her father. She loved him intensely--passionately! But the life of the ranges, after her taste of school and association with cultivated people, could not be entirely satisfactory. So she sat, huddled in a white wool wrapper, by the barred, open window, looking out across the plain. Only for the few lights at the corrals and bunk-house, it seemed a great, horizonless sea of darkness--for there was no moon and a haze had enveloped the high stars since twilight. No sound came to her ears at first. There is nothing so soundless as night on the plains--unless there be beasts near, either tamed or wild. No coyote slunk about the ranch-house. The horses were still in the corrals. The cattle were all too far distant to be heard. Not even the song of a sleepy puncher, as he wheeled around the herd, drifted to the barred window of Frances' room. Her second topic for thought was her father's evident expectation that the ranch-house might be attacked. Every stranger was an object of suspicion to him.