A touch of the rope--for no Eden Gray would endure a bit--whirled Shakra and sent her down the terraces like the wind. The avenue of the eucalyptus trees poured behind them, and out of this, with astonishing suddenness, they reached the gate. The fire already burned, for the night was hardly past, and Joseph squatted with the thin smoke blowing across his face unheeded. He was grinning with savage hatred and muttering. Connor knew what profound curse was being called down upon his head, but he had only a careless glance for Joseph. His eye up yonder where the full morning shone on the mountains, his mind was out in the world, at the race track, seeing in prospect beautiful Shakra fleeing away from the finest of the thoroughbreds. And he saw the face of Ruth, as her eyes would light at the sight of Shakra. He could have burst into song. Connor looking forward, high-headed, threw up his arm with a low shout, and Shakra burst into full gallop down the ravine. _CHAPTER NINETEEN_ When Ruth Manning read the note through for the first time she raised her glance to the bearer. The boy was so sun-blackened that the paler skin of the eyelids made his eyes seem supremely large. He was now poised accurately on one foot, rubbing his calloused heel up and down his shin, while he drank in the particulars of the telegraph office. He could hardly be a party to a deception. She looked over the note again, and read: DEAR MISS MANNING: I am a couple of miles out of Lukin, in a place to which the bearer of this note will bring you. I am sure you will come, for I am in trouble, out of which you can very easily help me. It is a matter which I cannot confide to any other person in Lukin. I am impatiently expecting you. BEN CONNOR. She crumpled the note in her hand thoughtfully, but, on the verge of dropping it in the waste basket, she smoothed it again, and for the third time went over the contents. Then she rose abruptly and confided her place to the lad who idled at the counter. "The wire's dead," she told him. "Besides, I'll be back in an hour or so." And she rode off a moment later with the boy. He had a blanket-pad without stirrups, and he kept prodding the sliding elbows of the horse with his bare toes while he chattered at Ruth, for the drum of the sounder had fascinated him and he wanted it explained. She listened to him with a smile of inattention, for she was thinking busily of Connor. Those thoughts made her look down to the dust that puffed up from the feet of the horses and became a light mist behind them; then, raising her head, she saw the blue ravines of the farther mountains and the sun haze about the crests. Connor had always been to her as the ship is to a traveler; the glamour of strange places was about him. Presently they left the trail, and passing about a hillside, came to an old shack whose unpainted wood had blackened with time.