For Taylor was convinced that he had looked upon death in the ranchhouse—upon the death of his hopes. He stood for an instant on the porch, while his passions raged through him, and then with a laugh of bitter humor he leaped on Spotted Tail. Half-way to the Mullarky cabin, with the big horse running like the wind, Taylor saw a shape looming out of the darkness ahead of him. He pulled Spotted Tail down, and loosed one of his pistols, and approached the shape warily, his muscles stiff and taut and ready for action. But it was only Martha who rode up to him. Her fortitude gone, her pains convulsing her, she wailed to Taylor the story of the night’s tragic adventure. “An’ Carrington’s got missy in the big house!” she concluded. “She fit him powerful hard, but it was no use—that rapscallion too much fo’ her!” She shouted the last words at Taylor, for Spotted Tail had received a jab in the sides with the rowels that hurt him cruelly, and, angered, he ran like a deer with the hungry cry of a wolf-pack in his ears. Like a black streak they rushed by Mrs. Mullarky, who breathed a fervent, “Oh, thank the Lord, it’s Taylor!” and before the good woman could catch her breath again, Spotted Tail and his rider had opened a huge, yawning space between himself and the laboring horse the woman rode. Riding with all his muscles taut as bowstrings, and a terrible, constricting pressure across his chest—so mighty were the savage passions that rioted within him—Taylor reached the foot of the long slope that led to the big house, and sent Spotted Tail tearing upward with rapid, desperate leaps. * * * * * When Carrington reached the big house soon after he had unknowingly passed Marion Harlan and Parsons on the river trail, he was in a sullen, impatient mood. For no word concerning Keats’s movements had reached Dawes, and Carrington was afflicted with a gloomy presentiment that something had happened to the man—that he had not been able to locate Taylor, or that he had found him and Taylor had succeeded in escaping him. Carrington did not go at once into the house, for captive though she was, and completely within his power, he did not want the girl to see him in his present mood. Lighting a cigar, and chewing it viciously, he walked to the stable. There, standing in the shadow of the building, he came upon the guard Martha had routed. He spoke sharply to the man, asking him why he was not inside guarding the “nigger.” The man brazenly announced that Martha had escaped him, omitting certain details and substituting others from his imagination. “If she hadn’t been a woman, now,” added the man in self-extenuation. Carrington laughed lowly. “We didn’t need _her_, anyway,” he said, and the other laughed with him.