There was yet her father's safety to consider. Well, her gallant new friend would look to that. "He'll be across again this afternoon," she thought, "and he'll watch the house careful. He couldn't do any more if he knew about the pole." So, her conscience satisfied, she decided to keep her own counsel. That decision cost her abundant grief and penitence in the months to come. While Marylyn was busy with her troublesome problem, a similar one was running in Dallas' brain, where it called for calculation. Would Matthews threaten the shack that day? It was scarcely probable. Night offered the best hours for an attack. Therefore, the wagon must return before night. But could Ben and Betty make Clark's and the return trip before then? So far, they had never done it. The previous summer, the drive was begun at dawn, when dawn was at three o'clock. "We'll just have to hike along," she said aloud to Marylyn. Into the coulee slid the wagon, its long tongue in the air, the loose tugs hitting the mules in the hock. When the team had scrambled up the farther side, Dallas put them to a trot by a flick of the black-snake. Then she bent forward over the dashboard, her eyes fixed eagerly on that distant brown blotch at the eastern ridge-top. But Marylyn, as they drew away, looked regretfully backward--to where a clump of tall cottonwoods, shaking their heart-shaped leaves in the wind, dappled a flower-studded stretch below the coulee mouth. Rod by rod the mules climbed the gently sloping prairie. The morning was perfect, and belied, in its beauty, even a suggestion of lurking harm. The air, crystal-clear and exhilarating, brought far things magically near to the eye. On every hand shimmered the springing grass, now, a pale emerald with the wind brushing it, again, in the still places, a darker green, and yet again--under the ravine's fringing willows, where the deer nibbled--a cool black. Out of it, the meadow-larks showed their good-luck waistcoats and rippled their tunes; out of it, countless wild roses smiled up pinkly to the sun. But all the loveliness of the new day only mocked at the lonely girls in the wagon. To them, the grey sands of their desert home, the blistering "northers," the brassy skies, were, unconsciously, synonymous of safety and peace. More than once, as they pressed on, the old, red-painted section-house rose before them, a very haven. Behind, the squat shack was gradually lessening in size. A jutting corner had already shut from view its crippled sentry.