endurance, and Olive remembered with a cold dread that Queen Katharine was only a farm-horse and not trained to such desperate efforts as this. Then she remembered the others, those dreadful hunters, were also mounted on farm horses, and this thought gave her some small comfort. She came home again after a most wretched day spent in aimless rambling over the hopeless black prairie and crept up to the outside platform to scan once more that dreary waste towards the endless western horizon. Far away towards the north-west she saw a band of horsemen huddled together and moving rapidly in an easterly direction. Olive’s heart stood still with terror. Oh! who were they? And why were they riding rapidly? Men rode in bands to funerals, but then they went slowly: they rode fast only when out on a man-hunt. She did not call up Napoleon Pompey, although he could see like a hawk; she dreaded to hear what his explanation would be. She watched with straining eyes until the men had disappeared within the belt of timber that marked the course of the Creek, then she came downstairs with her miserable discovery hidden in her heart. The next day dragged slowly by, Olive feeling more and more wretched and anxious each moment, and longing for Ezra’s return. Napoleon Pompey did nothing but speculate about the horse-thief and the probabilities of his capture. He regaled Olive with accounts of the numbers of men out on the hunt, the desperate character of their courage, and the murderous accuracy of their aim with revolvers. Sick at heart she had to listen to him and try and collect her terrified senses in order to make occasional comments and replies. Again she hid herself away from her neighbours and spent most of the day in a corn-stack, not two hundred yards from the house, whence she could see plainly without being seen. Uncle David came and stayed so long waiting for her, that she nearly smothered in the corn-stack before he went away, and she was able to come out and catch a breath of fresh air. Then Aunt Ruby came and peered all about everywhere, even down into the cellar, and stayed a good while there examining Olive’s milkpans, until Olive bethought herself of the device of sending off Diana to hasten Aunt Ruby’s exit from the cellar. This device succeeded: Aunt Ruby was so dismayed at seeing that redoubtable puppy lolloping up to her that she incontinently fled, and Olive emerged once more from the suffocation of the corn-stack. Mary Winkle came twice, fortunately without Willette, for that astute young person would instantly have discovered Olive, owing to the pertinacious company of Diana. A dog does not hang around a corn-stack the live-long day unless there is something interesting inside it claiming attention. Olive began to feel like a hunted criminal herself.