Lassiter said that he was not dead, and set to work to stem the blood. It seemed to Frances that the world had fallen away from her, leaving her alone. She stood aside a little, her chin up in her old imperious way, her eyes on the far hills where the tender sunlight was just striking among the white-limbed aspen trees. But her heart was bent down to the darkness of despair. She asked no questions of the men who were working so earnestly after their crude way to check that precious stream; she stood in the activity of passing troopers and escorted raiders insensible of any movement or sound in all the world around her. Only when Tom Lassiter stood from his ministrations and looked at her with understanding in his old weary eyes she turned her face back again, slowly resolute, to see if he had died. Her throat was dry. It took an effort to bring a sound from it, and then it was strained and wavering. "Is he--dead?" "No, miss, he ain't dead," Tom answered. But there was such a shadow of sorrow and pain in his eyes that tears gushed into her own. "Will--will--" Tom shook his head. "The Lord that give him alone can answer that," he said, a feeling sadness in his voice. The troops had moved on, save the detail singled for police duty. These were tightening girths and trimming for the road again a little way from the spot where Macdonald lay. The lieutenant returned hastily. "Miss Landcraft, I am ordered to convey you to Alamito Ranch--under guard," said he. Banjo Gibson, held to be harmless and insignificant by Major King, had been set free. Now he came up, leading his horse, shocked to the deepest fibers of his sensitive soul by the cowardly deed that Saul Chadron had done. "It went clean through him!" he said, rising from his inspection of Macdonald's wound. And then, moved by the pain in Frances' tearless eyes, he enlarged upon the advantages of that from a surgical view. "The beauty of a hole in a man's chest like that is that it lets the pizen dreen off," he told her. "It wouldn't surprise me none to see Mac up and around inside of a couple of weeks, for he's as hard as old hick'ry." "Well, I'm not going to Alamito Ranch and leave him out here to die of neglect, orders or no orders!" said she to the lieutenant. The young officer's face colored; he plucked at his new mustache in embarrassment. Perhaps the prospect of carrying a handsome and dignified young lady in his arms for a matter of twenty-odd miles was not as alluring to him as it might have been to another, for he was a slight young man, only a little while out of West Point. But orders were orders, and he gave Frances to understand that in diplomatic and polite phrasing. She scorned him and his veneration for orders, and turned from him coldly. "Is there no doctor with your detachment?" she asked. "He has gone on with the main body, Miss Landcraft. They have several wounded."