“But if I had you wouldn’t have told.”
The lad coloured. “You have known me quite a long time, Hetty.”
Hetty laughed, but there was a thrill in her voice as she turned to Miss Schuyler. “Now,” she said, “you know the kind of men we raise on the prairie.”
As they moved away together, Flora Schuyler cast a steady, scrutinizing glance at her companion. “I could have told you, Hetty,” she said.
“Yes,” said Hetty, with a little nod. “He wouldn’t go, and I feel so mean that I’m not fit to talk to you or anybody. But wait. You’ll hear something before to-morrow.”
It was not quite daylight when Miss Schuyler was awakened by a murmur of voices and a tramp of feet on the frozen sod. Almost at the same moment the door of her room opened, and a slim, white figure glided towards the window. Flora Schuyler stood beside it in another second or two, and felt that the girl whose arm she touched was trembling. The voices below grew louder, and they could see two men come running from the stable, while one or two others were flinging saddles upon the horses brought out in haste.
“He must have got away an hour ago,” said somebody. “The best horse Allonby had in the corral isn’t there now.”
Then Hetty sat down laughing excitedly, and let her head fall back on Flora Schuyler’s shoulder when she felt the warm girdling of her arm. In another moment she was crying and gasping painfully.
“He has got away. The best horse in the corral! Ten times as many of them couldn’t bring him back,” she said.
“Hetty,” said Miss Schuyler decisively, “you are shivering all through. Go back at once. He is all right now.”