Frances cheered her as much as might be with promises of the coming day. At the first streak of dawn, she told Mrs. Chadron, she would ride to the post and engage her father in the quest for the stolen girl. Soldiers would be thrown out over the country for miles on every side; the cowards would be hemmed in within a matter of hours, and Nola would be at home, laughing over the experiences of her tragic night. Frances was in the saddle at daybreak. She had left Mrs. Chadron in an uneasy sleep, watched over by Maggie. Banjo had not returned; no word had reached them from any source. Alvino let Frances out through the gate at the back of the garden, for it was her intention to follow the abductor's trail as far as possible without being led into strange country. Somebody, or some wandering herd of cattle, might pass that way and obliterate the traces before pursuers could be brought there. The tracks of the raider's horse were deep in the soft soil. She followed them as they cut across the open toward the river road, angling northward. At a place where the horse had stopped and made a trampling in the lose earth--testimony of the fight that Nola had made to get away--Frances started at the sight of something caught on a clump of bull-berry bushes close at hand. She drew near the object cautiously, leaning and looking in the half light of early morning. Presently assured, she reached out and picked it up, and rode on with it in her hand. Presently the trail merged into the river road, where hoofprints were so numerous that Frances was not skilful enough to follow it farther. But it was something to have established that the scoundrel was heading for the homesteaders' settlement, and that he had taken the road openly, as if he had nothing to fear. Also, that bit of evidence picked from the bushes might serve its purpose in the right time and place. She felt again that surge of indignation that had fired her heart early in the sad night past. The man who had lurked in the garden waiting his chance to snatch Nola away, was certain of the protection to which he fled. It was the daring execution of one man, but the planning of many, and at the head of them one with fire in his wild soul, quick passion in his eyes, and mastery over his far-riding band. It could be no other way. When she came to the branching of the roads she pulled up her horse and sat considering her course a little while. Presently she rode forward again, but not on the road that led to the army post. She had proceeded a mile, perhaps, along the road branching to the homesteaders' settlement, upon which she knew Macdonald's claim to lie somewhere up the river, when she rounded an elbow screened by tall-growing greasewood and came face to face with a small cavalcade of dusty men. At the head of them Alan Macdonald rode, beside an old man whose neck was guttered like a wasted candle and his branching great mustache gray as the dust on his bony shoulders.