Beyond Belgian Flat--how far beyond I do not remember, for I was beginning to feel the work, too, and the country looked all alike to me as we made it, mile by mile--the road follows close along by the lava, but the hills recede, and a little trail cuts across, meeting the road again at Deadman's Flat. Here we could not trust to the track, which from the nature of the ground was indistinct. So we divided our forces, Maverick taking the trail,--which I was quite willing he should do, for it had a look of most sinister invitation,--while I continued by the longer road. Our little discussion, or some atmospheric change,--some breath of coolness from the hills,--had brought me up out of my stupor of weariness. I began to feel both alert and nervous; my heart was beating fast. The still sunshine lay all around us, but where Maverick's white horse was climbing, the shadows were turning eastward, and the deep gulches, with their patches of aspen, were purple instead of brown. The aspens were left shaking where he broke through them and passed out of sight.
   I kept on at a good pace, and about three o'clock I, being then as much as half a mile away, saw the spot which I knew must be Deadman's Flat; and there were our men, the tall one and his boyish mate, standing quietly by their horses in broad sunlight, as if there were no one within a hundred miles. Their horses had drunk, and were cropping the thin grass, which had set its tooth in the gravel where, as at the other places, a living stream had perished. I spurred forward, with my heart thumping, but before they saw me I saw Maverick coming down the little gulch; and from the way he came I knew that he had seen them.
   The scene was awful in its treacherous peacefulness. Their shadows slept on the broad bed of sunlight, and the gulch was as cool and still as a lady's chamber. The great dead desert received the silence like a secret.
   Tenderfoot as I was, I knew quite well what must happen now; yet I was not prepared--could not realize it--even when the tall one put his hand quickly behind him and stepped ahead of his horse. There was the flash of his pistol, and the loud crack echoing in the hill, a second shot, and then Maverick replied deliberately, and the tall one was down, with his face in the grass.
   I heard a scream that sounded strangely like a woman's; but there were only the three, the little one, acting wildly, and Maverick bending over him who lay with his face in the grass. I saw him turn the body over, and the little fellow seemed to protest, and to try to push him away. I thought it strange he made no more of a fight, but I was not near enough to hear what those two said to each other.
   Still, the tragedy did not come home to me. lt was all like a scene, and I was without feeling in it except for that nervous trembling which I could not control.
   Maverick stood up at length, and came slowly toward me, wiping his face. He kept his hat in his hand, and, looking down at it, said huskily:--
   "I gave that man his life when I found him last spring runnin' loose like a wild thing in the mountains, and now I've took it; and God above knows I had no grudge ag'in' him, if he had stayed in his place. But he would have it so."
   "Maverick, I saw it all, and I can swear it was self-defense."
   His face drew into the tortured grimace which was his smile. "This here will never come before a jury," he said. "It's a family affair. Did ye see how he acted? Steppin' up to me like he was a first-class shot, or else a fool. He ain't nary one; he's a poor silly tool, the whip-hand of a girl that's bolt'n' from her friends like they was her mortal enemies. Go and take a look at him; then maybe you'll understand." He paused, and uttered the name of Jesus Christ, but not as such men often use it, with an inconsequence dreadful to hear: he was not idly swearing, but calling that name to witness solemnly in a case that would never come before a jury. I began to understand.
   "Is it--is the girl--"
   "Yes; it's our poor little Rose--that's the little one, in the gray hat. She'll give herself away if I don't. She don't care for nothin' nor nobody. She was runnin' away with that fellow--that dish-washin' Swede what I found in the mountings eatin' roots like a ground-hog, with the ends of his feet froze off. Now you know all I know--and more than she knows, for she thinks she was fond of him. She wa'n't, never--for I watched 'em, and I know. She was crazy to git away, and she took him for the chance."
   His excitement passed, and we sat apart and watched the pair at a distance. She--the little one--sat as passively by her dead as Maverick pondering his cruel deed; but with both it was a hopeless quiet.
   "Come," he said at length, "I've got to bury him. You look after her, and keep her with you till I git through. I'm givin' you the hardest part," he added wistfully, as if he fully realized how he had cut himself off from all such duties, henceforth, to the girl he was consigning to a stranger's care. I told him I thought that the funeral had more need of me than the mourner, and I shrank from intruding myself.
   "I dassent leave her by herself--see? I don't know what notion she may take next, and she won't let me come within a rope's length of her."
   I will not go over again that miserable hour in the willows, where I made her stay with me, out of sight of what Maverick was doing. Ours were the tender mercies of the wicked, I fear; but she must have felt that sympathy at least was near her, if not help. I wlll not say that her youth and distressful loveliness did not sharpen my perception of a sweet life wasted, gone utterly astray, which might have brought God's blessing into some man's home--perhaps Maverick's, had he not been so hardly dealt wlth. She was not of that great disposition of heart which can love best that which has sorest need of love; but she was all woman, and helpless and distraught wlth her tangle of grief and despalr, the nature of which I could only half comprehend.
   We sat there by the sunken stream, on the hot gravel where the sun had lain, the willows sifting their inconstant shadows over us; and I thought how other things as precious as "God's water" go astray on the Jericho road, or are captured and sold for a price, while dry hearts ache with the thirst that asks a "draught dlvine."
   The man's felt hat she wore, pulled down over her face, was pinned to her coil of braids which had slipped from the crown of her head. The hat was no longer even a protection; she cast it off, and the blonde braids, that had not been smoothed for a day and night, fell like ropes down her back. The sun had burned her checks and neck to a clear crimson; her blue eyes were as wild with weeping as a child's. She was a rose, but a rose that had been trampled in the dust; and her prayer was to be left there, rather than that we should take her home.
   I suppose I must have had some influence over her, for she allowed me to help her to arrange her forlorn disguise, and put her on her horse, which was more than could have been expected from the way she had received me. And so, about four o'clock, we started back.
   There was a scene when we headed the horses west; she protesting with wild sobs that she would not, could not, go home, that she would rather die, that we should never get her back alive, and so on. Maverick stood aside bitterly, and left her to me, and I was aware of a grotesque touch of jealousy--which, after all, was perhaps natural--in his dour face whenever he looked back at us. He kept some distance ahead, and waited for us when we fell too far in the rear.
   This would happen when from time to time her situation seemed to overpower her, and she would stop in the road, and wring her hands, and try to throw herself out of the saddle, and pray me to let her go.
   "Go where?" I would ask. "Where do you wish to go? Have you any plan, or suggestion, that I could help you to carry out?" But I said it only to show her how hopeless her resistance was. This she would own piteously, and say: "Nobody can help me. There ain't nowhere for me to go. But I can't go back. You won't let him make me, will you?"
   "Why cannot you go back to your father and your brothers?
This would usually silence her, and, setting her teeth upon her trouble, she would ride on, while I reproached myself, I knew not why.
   After one of these struggles--when she had given in to the force of circumstances, but still unconsenting and rebellious--Maverick fell back, and ranged his horse by her other side.
   "I know partly what's troubling you, and I'd rid you of that part quick enough," he said, with a kind of dogged patience in his hard voice; "but you can't get on there without me. You know that, don't you? You don't blame me for staying?"
   "I don't blame you for anything but what you've done to-day. You've broke my heart, and ruined me, and took away my last chance, and I don't care what becomes of me, so I don't have to go back."
   "You don't have to any more than you have to live. Dyin' is a good deal easier, but we can't always die when we want to. Suppose I found a little lost chlld on the road, and it cried to go home, and I didn't know where 'home' was, would I leave it there just because it cried and hung back? I'd take you to a better home if I knew of one; but I don't. And there's the old man. I suppose we could get some doctor to certify that he's out of his mind, and get him sent up to Blackfoot; but I guess we'd have to buy the doctor first."
   "Oh, hush, do, and leave me alone," she said.
   Maverick dug his spurs into his horse, and plunged ahead.
   "There, she cried, "now you know part of it; but it's the least part--the least, the least! Poor father, he's awful queer. He don't more than half the time know who I am,' she whispered "But it ain't him I'm running away from. It's myself--my own life."
   "What is it--can't you tell me?"
   She shook her head, but she kept on telling, as if she were talking to herself.
   "Father he's like I told you, and the boys--oh, that's worse! I can't get a decent woman to come there and live, and the women at Arco won't speak to me because I'm livin' there alone. They say--they think I ought to get married--to Maverick or somebody. I'll die first. I will die, if there's any way to, before I'll marry him!
   This may not sound like tragedy as I tell it, but I think it was tragedy to her. I tried to persuade her that it must be her imagination about the women at Arco; or, if some of them did talk,--as indeed I myself had heard, to my shame and dlsgust,--I told her I had never known that place where there was not one woman, at least, who could understand and help another in her trouble.
   "I don't know of any," she said simply.

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