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She stood up in the wagon, preening her finery, and looking down at her lover before she gave him her hand.

“I won’t be a hitchin’-post if you hate to be tied,” he said, holding out his hands invitingly.

As he spoke, the rider of a glittering bicycle glided noiselessly around the corner, apparently steering straight for Eben’s team of ranch-bred broncos. The pinto snorted wildly, and dashed into the street, jerking the reins from Parker’s hand, and rolling him over in the dust. There was the customary soothing yell with which civilization always greets a runaway, and a man sprang from a doorway on the opposite side of the street, and flung himself in front of the frightened horses. The pinto reared, but the stranger’s hand was on the bridle; a firm and skillful hand it seemed, for the horses came down on quivering haunches, and then stood still, striving to look around their blinders in search of the modern centaur that had terrified them.

Idy had fallen back into the seat without a word or cry, and sat there bolt upright, her face so white that it gleamed through the meshes of her veil.

“Well,” she said, with a long panting breath, “that was a pretty close call fer kingdom come, wasn’t it?”

The stranger, who was stroking the pinto’s nose, and talking to him coaxingly, laughed.

“Hello, Park!” he said as the latter came up. “Cold day, wasn’t it? Got your jacket pretty well dusted for once, I guess.”

The crowd that had collected laughed, and two or three bareheaded men began to examine the harness. While this was in progress, the livery-stable keeper took a look at the pinto’s teeth, and they all confided liberally in one another as to what they had thought when they first heard the racket. The young man who had stopped the team left them in the care of a newcomer, and walked around beside Idy.

“Won’t you come into the office and rest a little?” he asked.

“Oh, thanks, no,” said the girl, with a shuddering, nervous laugh; “I hain’t done nothin’ to make me tired. I think you’re the one that ought to take a rest. If it hadn’t been fer you I’d been a goner, sure.”

Her rescuer laughed again and turned away, moving his hand involuntarily toward his head, and discovering that it was bare. The discovery seemed to amuse him even more highly, and he made two or three strides to where his hat lay in the middle of the street, and went across to his office, dusting the hat with long, elaborate flirts of his gayly bordered silk handkerchief.

The knot of men began to disperse, and the boys, who lingered longest, finally straggled away, stifling their regret that no one was mangled beyond recognition. Parker climbed into the wagon, and drove over to Saunders’s store.

“I don’t know as I’d better buy a jersey to-day,” giggled Idy, as she stepped from the wagon to the elevated wooden sidewalk. “I’m afraid it won’t fit. I feel as if I’d been scared out o’ ten years’ growth.”

IV.

As they drove home in the chill, yellow evening, Idy turned to her lover, and asked abruptly,–

“Who was that felluh?”

“What felluh?”

“The young felluh with the sandy mus tache, the one that stopped the team.”

Parker’s manner had been evasive from the first, but at this the evasiveness became a highly concentrated unconcern. He looked across the lake, and essayed a yawn with feeble success.

“There was a good many standin’ around when I got there. What sort o’ lookin’ felluh was he?”

“I just told ye; with a sandy mustache, short, and middlin’ heavy set.”

“Sh-h-h!” said Parker, reaching for his gun. Idy stopped the horses.

A bronze ibis arose from the tules at the water’s edge, and flapped slowly westward, its pointed wings and hanging feet dripping with the gold of the sunset. Parker laid down his gun.