These held her for some time, but presently, true to childish fickleness, she left off playing with them to look for something else.

She laughed in glee as she ran her little hands down the slippery, shiny surface of Lassiter's leather chaps.

Soon she discovered one of the hanging gun--sheaths, and she dragged it up and began tugging at the huge black handle of the gun.

Jane Withersteen repressed an exclamation.

What significance there was to her in the little girl's efforts to dislodge that heavy weapon! Jane Withersteen saw Fay's play and her beauty and her love as most powerful allies to her own woman's part in a game that suddenly had acquired a strange zest and a hint of danger.