"Nothing to speak of," he replied, dryly. "I wasn't thinking of breakfast when I pulled out." "I'll get you some." Alice could not throw off the burden of his danger. "What will you do when my people return?" "I don't know--trust to luck." "You are very foolish. They are certain to come to-day." "They won't know who I am if you women don't give me away." "I'm sure Freeman--Professor Ward--will know you, for he also saw the placard." "That's no sign. Suppose he does--maybe he won't think it is his job to interfere. Anyway"--here his voice became decisive--"I won't leave you in such a fix as this." His eyes spoke to her of that which his tongue could not utter. "I wanted an excuse to come back, anyway," he concluded. "No matter what comes now, my job is here to protect you." She did not rebuke him, and Peggy--though she wondered at his tone--was too grateful for his presence even to question Alice's motive in permitting such remarks. As for Alice, she felt herself more and more involved in the tangled skein of his mysterious life. His sudden and reckless abandonment of the old love which had ruined him, and the new and equally irrational regard which he now professed for her, filled her with a delicious marveling. He appealed to a woman's imagination. He had the spice of the unknown. In her relationship with Ward there was no danger, no mystery--his courtship narrowly escaped being commonplace. She had accepted his attentions and expected to marry him, and yet the thought of the union produced, at its warmest, merely a glow of comfort, a sense of security, whereas the hint of being loved and protected by this Rob Roy of the hills, this reckless Rough Rider of the wilderness, was instinct with romance. Of course his devotion was a crazy folly, and yet, lying there in her rough bunk, with an impenetrable wall of snow shutting out the rest of the world, it was hard not to feel that this man and his future had become an inescapable part of her life--a part which grew in danger and in charm from hour to hour. Full two miles above the level of her own home, surrounded by peaks unscalably wild and lonely, deserted by those who should care for her, was it strange that she should return this man's adoring gaze with something of the primal woman's gratitude and submission? The noon darkened into dusk as they talked, slowly, with long pauses, and one by one the stirring facts of the rover's life came out. From his boyhood he had always done the reckless thing. He had known no restraint till, as a member of the Rough Riders, he yielded a partial obedience to his commanders. When the excitement of the campaigns was over he had deserted and gone back to the round-up wagon and the camp-fire.