"Why, not so very long. I reckon you must 'a' missed meetin' 'em by a hair." "I've got to catch up with them, right away! Is there anybody here that can guide me?" "My son can, and he'll be glad. He's just went to sleep back there in the tent after guardin' them fellers all night. I'll roust him out." The pioneer woman came back almost at once, and pressed a cup of her coffee upon Frances. Frances took the tin vessel eagerly, for she was chilled from her long ride. Then she dismounted to rest her horse while her guide was getting ready, and warm her numb feet at the fire. She told the woman how the scent of her coffee had led her out of her groping like a beacon light on the hill. "It's about three miles from here down to the valley," the woman said. "Coffee will carry on the mornin' air that way." "Do you think your son--?" "He's a-comin'," the woman replied. The boy came around the rock, leading a horse. He was wide awake and alert, bare-footed, bareheaded, and without a coat. He leaped nimbly onto his bare-backed beast, and Frances got into her saddle as fast as her numb limbs would lift her. As she road away after the recklessly riding youth, she felt the hope that she had warmed in her bosom all night paling to a shadow. It seemed that, circumstances were ranging after a chart marked out for them, and that her own earnest effort to interfere could not turn aside the tragedy set for the gray valley below her. Morning was broadening now; she could see her guide distinctly even when he rode many rods ahead. Dawn was the hour for treacherous men and deeds of stealth; Chadron would be on the way again before now, with the strength of the United States behind him to uphold his outlawed hand. When they came down into the valley there was a low-spreading mist over the gray sage, which lent a warmth to the raw morning wind. There was a sense of indistinctness through the mist which was an ally to Chadron. Ten rods away, even in the growing morning, it would have been impossible to tell a cowboy from a cavalryman. Here a haystack smoldered in what had been a farmstead yard; its thin blue smoke wavered up in the morning, incense over the dead hope of the humble heart that had dreamed it had found a refuge in that spot. At the roadside a little farther on the burned ruins of a cabin lay. It had stood so near the wheel track that the heat of its embers was warm on Frances' face as she galloped by. The wire fence was cut between each post, beyond splicing or repair; the shrubs which some home-hungry woman had set in her dooryard were trampled; the well curb was overthrown.