“The other three boys—Jimmy Vail, Joe Willis, an’ thet little Cairns boy—a nervy kid! they, with Cairns leadin’, tried to buck thet herd round to the pocket. It was a wild, fool idee. I couldn’t do nothin’. The boys got hemmed in between the steers an’ the wash—thet they hedn’t no chance to see, either. Vail an’ Willis was run down right before our eyes. An’ Cairns, who rode a fine hoss, he did some ridin’. I never seen equaled, en’ would hev beat the steers if there’d been any room to run in. I was high up an’ could see how the steers kept spillin’ by twos an’ threes over into the wash. Cairns put his hoss to a place thet was too wide fer any hoss, an’ broke his neck an’ the hoss’s too. We found that out after, an’ as fer Vail an’ Willis—two thousand steers ran over the poor boys. There wasn’t much left to pack home fer burying!... An’, Miss Withersteen, thet all happened yesterday, en’ I believe, if the white herd didn’t run over the wall of the Pass, it’s runnin’ yet.” On the morning of the second day after Judkins’s recital, during which time Jane remained indoors a prey to regret and sorrow for the boy riders, and a new and now strangely insistent fear for her own person, she again heard what she had missed more than she dared honestly confess—the soft, jingling step of Lassiter. Almost overwhelming relief surged through her, a feeling as akin to joy as any she could have been capable of in those gloomy hours of shadow, and one that suddenly stunned her with the significance of what Lassiter had come to mean to her. She had begged him, for his own sake, to leave Cottonwoods. She might yet beg that, if her weakening courage permitted her to dare absolute loneliness and helplessness, but she realized now that if she were left alone her life would become one long, hideous nightmare. When his soft steps clinked into the hall, in answer to her greeting, and his tall, black-garbed form filled the door, she felt an inexpressible sense of immediate safety. In his presence she lost her fear of the dim passageways of Withersteen House and of every sound. Always it had been that, when he entered the court or the hall, she had experienced a distinctly sickening but gradually lessening shock at sight of the huge black guns swinging at his sides. This time the sickening shock again visited her, it was, however, because a revealing flash of thought told her that it was not alone Lassiter who was thrillingly welcome, but also his fatal weapons. They meant so much. How she had fallen—how broken and spiritless must she be—to have still the same old horror of Lassiter’s guns and his name, yet feel somehow a cold, shrinking protection in their law and might and use. “Did you trail Venters—find his wonderful valley?” she asked, eagerly. “Yes, an’ I reckon it’s sure a wonderful place.” “Is he safe there?”