Mrs. Ridley was upon the
porch.
"Miss Crawford is back?" he called to her from the street.
She shook her head.
"Not yet. Ain't you--"
He did not wait to listen. Running now, he came to the little back
yard, and to a tall bay horse, saddled and bridled, standing quietly
at the fence. At first glance he thought, as Billy Jordan had thought,
that the animal was tied there. And then he saw that the bridle-reins
were upon the ground, that they had been trampled upon and broken,
that the two stirrups were hanging upside down in the stirrup leathers
as stirrups are likely to do when a saddled horse has been running
riderless.
She had been to investigate the Secret! She had been gone all day, all
night! And now her horse had come home without her! He dared not try
to think what had happened to her; he knew that she must have
dismounted while at the spring to examine the ground; he knew that
there were sections of the desert alive with rattlesnakes.
The Great Work which had walked and slept with him for weeks, which
had never in a single waking hour been absent from his thoughts, was
forgotten as though it had never been. The Great Work was suddenly a
trifle, a nothing. It did not matter; nothing in the wide world but
one thing mattered. Failure of the Great Work was nothing if only a
slender, gray-eyed, frank-souled girl were safe.
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