It took only a short time to stow the few boxes and bundles in the wagon. When all was ready, Harry hastened to help Isita into the front seat beside her, before any other arrangement could be suggested. She was determined to have some sort of talk with her friend before they were separated. But she was soon made to realize that Biane controlled his family absolutely. At every attempt she made to talk confidently with Isita, Biane leaned across the back of the seat and broke into their talk with other subjects until she gave up in despair.
The conviction that this abrupt departure was caused by other reasons than those that Joe and his father had offered, grew steadily in her, and the uneasy suspense that she noticed in the whole Biane family strengthened her belief. By the time they reached Shoshone she was so tired, so nervously on edge, that she drove at once to Kinney's Hotel, got out there, and left Biane to take his family on to the station.
"When you've finished with the team," she said to him, "bring them back here to the livery stable. I'll leave orders for feeding them. What time does your train leave?"
"Our train?" he repeated, darting a suspicious glance at her.
"Yes. I want to come down and say good-by to Isita."
"Sur-rely. I was forgetting. We go at ten o'clock." And with his cold smile that showed his teeth and half closed his yellow eyes, the Portuguese drove off. Isita turned to give Harry one entreating look before the dusk hid her.
"If I'd had the least chance to talk to her," Harry said to herself, with a sigh, "we could have fixed up a plan of escape. She could have slipped off the train at the next station, or something. I could see that her mother was nearly scared to death, or she'd have explained this journey to me."
Well, it was too late now to think of what might have been done. Harry could only have faith in Isita's courage and ambition to free herself from this hateful bondage.
In the hotel office she stopped to chat with the clerk, who was an old-time friend of hers and Rob's. "I'm going up to my room to rest now," she said, "but I want to be called in plenty of time to meet that ten-o'clock train going East."
She was so tired that the moment her head touched the pillow she was off to sleep. When some time later there came a pounding on the door, she stumbled up, forgetting where she was.