"H'm. Well I'm very glad there's no chance of your undergoing the actual experience," he answered drily, turning away to gaze out on the surrounding country, but really that she should not see the expression that swept across his face. For it had come to this. Rupert Vipan-- adventurer, renegade, freebooter--a stranger, for many a year, to any softening or tender feeling--a man, too, who had already attained middle age--thought, as he listened to her words, how willingly he would give the remainder of his life for just that experience. To be besieged here for days with this girl--only they two, all alone together--himself her sole protector, with a violent and horrible death at the end of it, he admitted at that moment would be to him Paradise. Yet a consciousness of the absurdity of the idea struck him even then. Who was he in her eyes, in the eyes of those around her, her friends and protectors? An unknown adventurer--a mere commonplace border ruffian. And--at his time of life, too! "Were you ever besieged in one of these places?" asked Yseulte. Her voice recalled him to himself. "Once," he answered. "In '67, on the Smoky Hill route, four stagemen and myself. The reds burnt us out the first night, and we got into the dug-out. It was wearisome work, for they preserved a most respectful distance once we were down there. They wouldn't haul off, though. So one man kept a look-out at the loop-holes, while the rest of us played poker or varied the tedium by swapping lies." "Doing what?" "Oh, exchanging `experiences.' Tall twisters some of them were, too. Well, by the third night we got so sick of it that we made up our minds to try and quit. The reds were still hanging around. We needn't have, for we had plenty of rations and ammunition, but the business was becoming so intolerably monotonous. Well, we started, and the upshot was that out of the five, three of us fell in with a cavalry patrol the next evening, having dodged the reds all day, each of us with an arrow or two stuck more or less badly into him, and the Cheyennes went home with a brace of new scalps. Otherwise the affair was tame enough." "Tame, indeed? But you tell it rather tamely. Now, how did the Indians first come to attack you? You left that out." "Did I? Oh, well, I happened to discover their propinquity, and concluded to warn the stage people. The red brother divined my intention afar off, and came for me--and them." "You ought to be called the Providence of the Plains," she said, with a laugh that belied the seriousness of her face. "There, I christen you that on the spot." "That would be a good joke to tell them over in Henniker City! But to be serious, in these latter days I never go out of my way to spoil the red brother's fun. None of my business, any way." "But you made an exception in favour of us. I don't believe you are talking seriously at all."