Women in the office of the hotel, seeing that their men were about to ride away, rushed out to bid them goodbye.
The young boys and old men were not taken. After the others were gone, there was an almost deathlike stillness down in the square. The women returned indoors. Old men, many of them gray-bearded, stood in groups on the sidewalks talking in low tones and shaking their grizzled heads ominously. The boys trooped over to the pool hall. The proprietor had been among the men who had ridden away and so the boys could play without charge which they did gleefully.
Mary sank down on a low rocker near the window and her sweet blue eyes were tragic as she gazed up at her friend. “Dora,” she said “if you were a boy, would you have dared to ride into a robber’s den the way—”
“Sure thing,” was the brief reply. Dora still stood gazing at the desert valley. Although the road disappeared from their sight when it first dipped down from the town, she knew that the riders would again be visible as they crossed to “The Dragoons.”
“If we can see them crossing the valley, so can the bandits,” she said, thinking aloud. “Of course, the robbers must have look-outs if that’s what men are called who spy around to warn the others of danger.”
“There they are! There they are!” Mary leaped to her feet to point. Dark distant objects were moving rapidly across the moonlit sands of the valley.
Suddenly Mary turned, a new alarm expressed in her face. “Dora,” she cried, “now that only old men and boys are left here to protect this town, what if the bandits should circle around and rob the stores and the post office—”
“And carry off the beautiful young damsels,” Dora laughingly added, “like a chapter out of an old-time story-book.”
“It may be amusing to you,” Mary seemed actually hurt, “but things do happen even now that are worse than anything I ever read in a book.”
“Righto! Ah agrees, as Sambo says.” Dora turned and slipped an arm about her friend, and then, as though trying to change her thought, she went on, “I wonder if that old darky and Marthy, his wife, will be working at Sunnybank Seminary next fall when we go back.”