wound about the foot of the hill.

"That's the old lady's place. Want I should drive in?" "No,
thank you. I'll roll out here. Much obliged to you. Good
night."

His passenger stepped down over the front wheel, and the old
man drove on reluctantly, looking back as if he would like to see
how the stranger would be received.

As Nils was crossing the dry creek he heard the restive
tramp of a horse coming toward him down the hill. Instantly he
flashed out of the road and stood behind a thicket of wild plum
bushes that grew in the sandy bed. Peering through the dusk, be
saw a light horse, under tight rein, descending the hill at a
sharp walk. The rider was a slender woman--barely visible
against the dark hillside--wearing an old-fashioned derby hat and
a long riding skirt. She sat lightly in the saddle, with her
chin high, and seemed to be looking into the distance. As she
passed the plum thicket her horse snuffed the air and shied. She
struck him, pulling him in sharply, with an angry exclamation,
"Blazne!" in Bohemian. Once in the main road, she let him
out into a lope, and they soon emerged upon the crest of high land,
where they moved along the skyline, silhouetted against the band
of faint colour that lingered in the west. This horse and rider,
with their free, rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things
to be seen on the face of the flat country. They seemed, in the
last sad light of evening, not to be there accidentally, but as
an inevitable detail of the landscape.