She drew herself up.
"I am sorry that I have disturbed your rest," she said, and
walked away, her head in the air; but all the way back to the
ranchhouse she kept repeating over and over to herself: "Tomorrow
they will shoot him! Tomorrow they will shoot him!
Tomorrow they will shoot him!"
CHAPTER XIV
'TWIXT LOVE AND DUTY
FOR an hour Barbara Harding paced the veranda of the
ranchhouse, pride and love battling for the ascendency within
her breast. She could not let him die, that she knew; but how
might she save him?
The strains of music and the laughter from the bunkhouse
had ceased. The ranch slept. Over the brow of the low bluff
upon the opposite side of the river a little party of silent
horsemen filed downward to the ford. At the bluff's foot a
barbed-wire fence marked the eastern boundary of the ranch's
enclosed fields. The foremost horseman dismounted and cut
the strands of wire, carrying them to one side from the path
of the feet of the horses which now passed through the
opening he had made.
Down into the river they rode following the ford even in the
darkness with an assurance which indicated long familiarity.
Then through a fringe of willows out across a meadow
toward the ranch buildings the riders made their way.
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