In the kitchen, sitting beside the table, on which was a spotlessly clean tablecloth, with dishes set for one--she had saved Calumet's supper, and it was steaming in the warming-closet of the stove--Betty sat.

She was mending Bob's stockings, and thinking of her life during the past few months--and Calumet.

And when she heard the black come into the ranchhouse yard--she knew the black's gait already--she trembled a little, put aside her mending, and went to the window.
The moon threw a white light in the yard, and she saw Calumet dismount.
When he did not turn the black into the corral, hitching him, instead, to one of the rails, without even removing the saddle, she suspected that something unusual had happened.
She was certain of it when she heard Calumet cross the porch with a rapid step, and if in her certainty there had been the slightest doubt, it disappeared when he opened the kitchen door.
He looked tired; he had evidently ridden hard, for the alkali dust was thick on his clothing; he was breathing fast, his eyes were burning with some deep emotion, his lips were grim and hard.
He closed the door and stood with his back against it, looking at her.
Something had wrought a wonderful change in him.

He was not the Calumet she had known--brutal, vicious, domineering, sneering; though he was laboring under some great excitement, suppressing it, so that to an eye less keen than hers it might have seemed that he had been undergoing some great physical exertion and was just recovering from it.

It seemed to her that he had found himself; that that regeneration for which she had hoped had come--had taken place between the time he had left that morning and now.
She did not know that it had been a mighty struggle of three days' duration; that the transformation had been a slow, tortuous thing to him.