For three days following her discovery of Bob McGraw's name written beneath the sweat-band of the outlaw's hat, Donna Corblay lay on her bed at the Hat Ranch, battling with herself in an effort to refrain from thinking the terrible thoughts that persisted in obtruding themselves upon her tortured brain. For three days, and the greater portion of two nights, she had cried aloud to the four dumb walls of the Hat Ranch: “He didn't do it. He couldn't do it. My Bob couldn't do such a thing. It's some terrible mistake. Oh, my husband! My dear, thoughtless, impulsive husband! Oh, Bob! Bob! Come back and face them and tell them you didn't do it. Only tell me, and I'll believe you and stick by you through everything.” And then the horrible thought that he was guilty; that even now he was being hunted, hatless, hungry, weary and thirsty--a pariah with every honest man's hand raised against him--reminded her that the limit of her wretchedness lay, not in the fact that her faith in him had been shattered, but in the more appalling consciousness that he would not come back to her! Wild herald of woe and death, he had flitted into her life--as carelessly as he came he had departed, and she knew he would not come back. Yes, Bob was too shrewd a man not to realize that in abandoning his hat he had left behind him the evidence that must send him to the penitentiary should he ever return to his old haunts in Inyo and Mono counties. He loved his liberty too well to sacrifice it, and he knew her code. It did not seem possible to Donna that he would have the audacity to face her again; so, man-like, he would not try. And then she would think of him as she had seen him that first night, leaning on Friar Tuck's neck and gazing at her in the dim ghostly light of a green switch-lantern--telling her with his eyes that he loved her. She recalled his little mocking inscrutable smile, the manhood that had won her to him when first they met, and against all this she remembered that she had presented him with the hat which the express messenger had showed her--she had seen him write his name in indelible pencil under the leathern sweat-band! She knew he had ridden north from San Pasqual the night before the hold-up--and thirty-five miles was as much as one small tough horse could do in the desert between the hour at which Bob had left her and his presumable arrival at Garlock, where he lay in wait for the stage. The automatic gun, the hat, the khaki clothing, the blue bandanna handkerchief which the bandit had used for a mask, the fact that he was mounted--all had pointed to her husband as the bandit. But the description of the horse was at variance with the facts, and moreover--Donna thought of this on the third day--where had Bob gotten that rifle with which he killed the express messenger's horse?