Alida seemed under a spell in her preparations for the night. Each thing she did as she had done it in her dream the night before; it was as if she were constrained by a power greater than her will to fulfil a sinister prophecy. Yet now and then she would stop and wonder if she might not break the spell by doing things differently from the way she had dreamed them. Her hand grasped the knob of the door uncertainly, and she swung it to and fro on its creaking hinges, while her mind seemed likewise to sway hither and thither. Should she fasten the door and push the bureau against it, as it had been in the dream, or should she leave door and windows gaping wide for them? And then, as one who walks and does familiar things in sleep, she shut the door and turned the key. Jim smiled at her, but she could no longer look at him. One of the children wailed fretfully from the room beyond. Sleep had become a scourge in the stifling heat. One by one she lowered the windows and nailed them down; then she dragged the brown bureau against the door, took the brace of six-shooters from the wall, and sat down with Jim to wait. “What are you going to do with them toys?” he asked, as he saw her examine the chambers of one of the six-shooters. “You ain’t going to let yourself be caught like a rat in a hole, are you?” she reproached him. “’Ain’t we agreed that it’s best to keep onpleasant family matters from the kids?” He smiled at her bravely. “The remembrance of what we’re anticipatin’ ain’t going to help young Jim to get to Congress when his time comes, nor it ain’t going to help the girls get good husbands, either. This here country ain’t what it was in the way of liberality since it’s got to be a State.” “Sh-sh-sh!” she said. “Is that the range-cattle stampedin’ after water, or is it—” They listened. The furniture in the room crackled; there was not a fibre of it to which the resistless heat had not penetrated. On the range the cattle bellowed in their thirst-torture; in the intervals of their cries sounded something far off, but regular as the thumping of a ship’s screw. The woman did not need an answer to her question. The steady trampling of hoofs came muffled through the dead air, but the sound was unmistakable. She put her arms about the man’s neck and crushed him to her with all her woman strength. “Oh, Jim, you’ve been a good man to me!” “Steady—steady.” He strained her close to him. “They’d be, by the sound of them, on the straight bit of road now, before the turn. Soon we’ll hear their hoofs ring hollow as they cross the plank bridge.” His plainsman’s faculty was as keen as ever; his calculation of the horsemen’s distance was made as though he were the least concerned. All Alida’s courage had gone, with the dread thing at hand. She clung to him, dazed. “They’re sober, all right enough.” “How do you know?” “They’d be cursing and bellowing if they were drunk.”