"The years creep slowly by, Lorena, The snow is on the grass again; The sun's low down the sky, Lorena—"

Blue gathered himself together and jumped a washout three feet across and goodness knows how deep and jarred that melancholy melody quite out of Billy Louise's mind. When she had settled herself again to the slow climb, she broke out with what she called Ward's Come-all-ye, and with a twinkle of eye and both dimples showing deep, went on with a very slight interruption in her singing.

"'Oh, a ten-dollar hoss and a forty-dollar saddle'—that's you Blue. You don't amount to nothing nohow, doing jackrabbit stunts like that when I'm not looking! 'Coma ti yi youpy, youpy-a.'" She watched a cloud shadow sweep like a great bird over a sunny slope and murmured while she watched: "Cloud-boats sailing sunny seas—is that original, or have I cribbed it from some honest-to-goodness poet? Blue, if fate hadn't made a cowpuncher of me, I'd be chewing up lead-pencils trying to find a rhyme for alfalfa, maybe. And where would you be, you old skate? If the Louise of me had been developed at the expense of the Billy of me, and I'd taken to making battenburg doilies with butterflies in the corners, and embroidering corset covers till I put my eyes out, and writing poetry on Sundays when mommie wouldn't let me sew. I wonder if Ward— Maybe he'd have liked me better if I'd lived up to the Louise and cut out the Billy part. I'd be home, right now, asking mommie whether I should use soda or baking-powder to make my muffins with— Oh, gracious!" She leaned over and caught a handful of Blue's slatey mane and tousled it, till he laid his ears flat on his head and nipped his nose around to show her that his teeth were bared to the gums. Billy Louise laughed and gave another yank.

"You wish I were an embroidering young lady, do you? Aw, where would you be, if you didn't have me to devil the life out of you? Well, why don't you take a chunk out of me, then? Don't be an old bluffer, Blue. If you want to eat me, why, go to it; only you don't. You're just a-bluffing. You like to be tousled and you know it; else why do you tag me all over the place when I don't want you? Huh? That's to pay you back for jumping that washout when I wasn't looking." A twitch of the mane here brought Blue's head around again with all his teeth showing. "And this is for jarring that lovely, weepy song out of me. You know you hate it; you always do lay back your ears when I sing that, but—oh, all right—when I sing, then. But you've got to stand for it. I've been an indigo bag all day long, and I'm going to sing if I want to. Fate made me a lady cowpunch instead of a poet-ess, and you can't stop me from singing when I feel it in my system."

She began again with the "Ten-dollar hoss and forty-dollar saddle," and sang as much of the old trail song as she had ever heard and could remember, substituting milder expletives now and then and laughing at herself for doing it, because a self-confessed "lady cowpunch" is after all hedged about by certain limitations in the matter of both speech and conduct. She did not sing it all, but she sang enough to last over a mile of rough going, and she did not have to repeat many verses to do it.

Blue, because she still left the reins loose, chose his own trail, which was easier than that which they had taken in the forenoon, but more roundabout. Billy Louise, observing how he avoided rocky patches and went considerably out of his way to keep his feet on soft soil, stopped in the middle of a "Coma ti yi" to ask him solicitously if he were getting tender-footed; and promised him a few days off, in the pasture. Thereafter she encouraged the roundabout progress, even though she knew it would keep them in the hills until dusk; for she was foolishly careful of Blue, however much she might tease him and call him names.

Quite suddenly, just at sundown, her cheerful journeying was interrupted in a most unexpected manner. She was dreaming along a flat-bottomed canyon, looking for an easy way across, when Blue threw up his head, listened with his ears thrust forward, and sniffed with widened nostrils. From his manner, almost anything might lie ahead of them. And because certain of the possibilities would call for quick action if any of them became a certainty, Billy Louise twisted her gun-belt around so that her six-shooter swung within easy reach of her hand. With her fingers she made sure that the gun was loose in its holster and kicked Blue mildly as a hint to go on and see what it was all about.

Blue went forward, stepping easily on the soft sidehill. In rough country, whatever you want to see is nearly always around a sharp bend; you read it so in the stories and books of travels, and when you ride out in the hills, you find it so in reality. Billy Louise rode for three or four minutes before she received any inkling of what lay ahead, though Blue's behavior during that interval had served to reassure her somewhat. He was interested still in what lay just out of sight beyond a shoulder of the hill, but he did not appear to be in the least alarmed. Therefore, Billy Louise knew it couldn't be a bear, at any rate.

They came to the point of the hill's shoulder, and Billy Louise tightened the reins instinctively while she stared at what lay revealed beneath. The head of the gulch was blocked with a corral—small, high, hidden from view on all sides save where she stood, by the jagged walls of rock and heavy aspen thickets beyond.

The corral was but the setting for what Billy Louise stared at so unbelievingly. A horseman had ridden out of the corral just as she came into sight, had turned a sharp corner, and had disappeared by riding up the same slope she occupied, but farther along, and in a shallow depression which hid him completely after that one brief glimpse.

Of course, the gulch was dusky with deep shadows, and she had had only a glimpse. But the horse was a dark bay, and the rider was slim and tall and wore a gray hat. The heart of Billy Louise paused a moment from its steady beating and then sank heavily under a great weight. She was range-born and range-bred. She had sat wide-eyed on her daddy's knees and heard him tell of losses in cattle and horses and of corrals found hidden away in strange places and of unknown riders who disappeared mysteriously into the hills. She had heard of these things; they were a part of the stage setting for wild dramas of the West.

With a white line showing around her close-pressed lips and a horror in her wide-eyed glance, she rode quietly along the side of the bluff toward where she had seen the horseman disappear. He was riding a dark bay, and he wore a gray hat and dark coat, and he was slim and tall. Billy Louise made a sound that was close to a groan and set her teeth hard together afterwards.

She reached the hillside just above the corral. There were cattle down there, moving uneasily about in the shadows. Of the horseman there was of course no sign; just the corral, and a few restless cattle shut inside, and on the hilltops a soft, rose-violet glow, and in the sky beyond a blend of purple and deep crimson to show where the sun had been. Close beside her as she stood looking down a little, gray bird twittered wistfully.

Billy Louise took a deep breath and rode on, angling slightly up the bluff, so that she could cross at the head of the gulch. It was very quiet, very peaceful, and wildly beautiful, this jumble of hills and deep-gashed canyons. But Billy Louise felt as though something precious had died. She should have gone down and investigated and turned those cattle loose; that is, if she dared. Well, she dared; it was not fear that held her to the upper slopes. She did not want to know what brand they bore or whether an iron had seared fresh marks.

"Oh, God!" she said once aloud; and there was a prayer and a protest, a curse and a question all in those two words.

So trouble—trouble that sickened her very soul and choked her into dumbness and squeezed her heart so that the ache of it was agony—came and rode with her through the brooding dusk of the canyons and over the brighter hilltops.

Billy Louise did not remember anything much about that ride, except that she was glad the way was long. Blue carried her steadily on and on and needed no guiding, and though Wolverine canyon was black dark in most places, she liked it so.

John Pringle was standing by the gate waiting for her, which was unusual, if Billy Louise had been normal enough to notice it. He came forward and took Blue by the bridle when she dismounted, which was still more unusual, for Billy Louise always cared for her own horse both from habit and preference.

"Yor mommie, she's sick," he announced stolidly. "She's worry you maybe hurt yoreself. Yo better go, maybe."

Billy Louise did not answer, but ran up the path to the cabin. "Oh, has everything got to happen all at once?" she cried aloud, protesting against the implacableness of misfortune.

"Yor mommie's sick," Phoebe announced in a whisper. "She's crazy 'cause you been so long. She's awful bad, I guess."

Billy Louise said nothing, but went in where her mother lay moaning, her face white and turned to the ceiling. Billy Louise herself had pulled up her reserves of strength and cheerfulness, and the fingers she laid on her mother's forehead were cool and steady.

"Poor old mommie! Is it that nasty lumbago again?" she asked caressingly and did not permit the tiniest shade of anxiety to spoil the reassurance of her presence. "I went farther than usual, and Blue's pretty tender, so I eased him along, and I'm fearfully late. I suppose you've been having all kinds of disasters happening to me." She was passing her fingers soothingly over her mother's forehead while she explained, and she saw that her mother did not moan so much as when she came into the room.

"Of course I worried. I wish you wouldn't take them long rides. Oh, I guess it's lumbago—mostly—but seems like it ain't, either. The pain seems to be mostly in my side." She stirred restlessly and moaned again.

"What's Phoebe been doing for it? You don't seem to have any fever, mommie—and that's a good thing. I'll go fix you one of those dandy spice poultices. Had any supper, mommie?"

"Oh, I couldn't eat. Phoebe made a hop poultice, but it's awful soppy."

"Well, never mind. Your dear daughter is on the job now. She'll have you all comfy in just about two minutes. Head ache, mum? All right. I'll just shake up your pilly and bring you such a dandy spice poultice I expect you'll want to eat it!" Billy Louise's voice was soft and had a broody sweetness when she wished it so, that soothed more than medicine. Her mother's eyes closed wearily while the girl talked; the muscles of her face relaxed a little from their look of pain.

Billy Louise bent and laid her lips lightly on her mother's cheek. "Poor old mommie! I'd have come home a-running if I'd known she was sick and had to have nasty, soppy stuff."

In the kitchen a very different Billy Louise measured spices, and asked a question now and then in a whisper, and breathed with a repressed unevenness which betrayed the strain she was under.

"Tell John to saddle up and go for the doctor, Phoebe, and don't let mommie know, whatever you do. This isn't her lumbago at all. I don't know what it is. I wonder if a hot turpentine cloth wouldn't be better than this? I've a good mind to try it; her eyes are glassy with fever, and her skin is cold as a fish. You tell John to hurry up. He can ride Boxer. Tell him I want him to get a doctor here by to-morrow noon if he has to kill his horse doing it."

"Is she that bad?" Phoebe's black eyes glistened with consternation. "She's groaned all day and shook her head like this all time."

"Oh, stop looking like that! No wonder she's sick, if you've stood over her with that kind of a face on you. You look as if someone were dead in the house!"

"I'm skeered of sick folks. Honest, it gives me shivers."

"Well, keep out then. Make some fresh tea, Phoebe—or no, make some good, strong coffee. I'll need it, if I'm up all night. Make it strong, Phoebe. Hurry, and—" She stopped short and ran into the bedroom, called there by her mother's cry of pain.

That night took its toll of Billy Louise and left a seared place in her memory. It was a night of snapping fire in the cook-stove that hot water might be always ready; of tireless struggle with the pain that came and tortured, retired sullenly from Billy Louise's stubborn fighting with poultices and turpentine cloths and every homely remedy she had ever heard of, and came again just when she thought she had won the fight.

There was no time to give thought to the trouble that had ridden home with her, though its presence was like a black shadow behind her while she worked and went to and fro between bedroom and kitchen, and fought that tearing pain.

She met the dawn hollow-eyed and so tired she could not worry very much about anything. Her mother slept uneasily to prove that the battle had not gone altogether against the girl who had fought the night through. She had her reward in full measure when the doctor came, in the heat of noon, and after terrible minutes of suspense for Billy Louise while he counted pulse and took temperature and studied symptoms, told her that she had done well, and that she and her homely poultices had held back tragedy from that house.

Billy Louise lay down upon the couch out on the back porch and slept heavily for three hours, while Phoebe and the doctor watched over her mother.

She woke with a start. She had been dreaming, and the dream had taken from her cheeks what little color her night vigil had left. She had dreamed that Ward was in danger, that men were hunting him for what he had done at that corral. The corral seemed the center of a fight between Ward and the men. She dreamed that he came to her, and that she must hide him away and save him. But though she took him to Minervy's cave, which was secret enough for her purpose, yet she could not feel that he was safe, even there. There was something—some menace.

Billy Louise went softly into the house, tiptoed to the door of her mother's room, and saw that she lay quiet, with her eyes closed. Beside the window the doctor sat with his spectacles far down toward the end of his nose, reading a pale-green pamphlet that he must have brought in his pocket. Phoebe was down by the creek, washing clothes in the shade of a willow-clump.

She went into her own room, still walking on her toes. In her trunk was a blue plush box of the kind that is given to one at Christmas. It was faded, and the clasp was showing brassy at the edges. Sitting upon her bed with the box in her lap, Billy Louise pawed hastily in the jumble of keepsakes it held: an eagle's claw which she meant sometime to have mounted for a brooch; three or four arrowheads of the shiny, black stuff which the Indians were said to have brought from Yellowstone Park, a knot of green ribbon which she had worn to a St. Patrick's Day dance in Boise; rattlesnake rattles of all sizes; several folded clippings—verses that had caught her fancy and had been put away and forgotten; an amber bead she had found once. She turned the box upside down in her lap and shook it. It must be there—the thing she sought; the thing that had troubled her most in her dream; the thing that was a menace while it existed. It was at the very bottom of the box, caught in a corner. She took it out with fingers that trembled, crumpled it into a little ball so that she could not read what it said, straightened it immediately, and read it reluctantly from the beginning to the end where the last word was clipped short with hasty scissors. A paragraph cut from a newspaper, it was; yellow and frayed from contact with other objects, telling of things—

Billy Louise bit her lips until they hurt, but she could not keep back the tears that came hot and stinging while she read. She slid the little heap of odds and ends to the middle of the bed, crushed the clipping into her palm, and went out stealthily into the immaculate kitchen. As if she were being spied upon, she went cautiously to the stove, lifted a lid, and dropped the clipping in where the wood blazed the brightest. She watched it flare and become nothing—not even a pinch of ashes; the clipping was not very large. When it was gone, she put the lid back and went tiptoeing to the door. Then she ran.

Phoebe was down by the creek, so Billy Louise went to the stable, through that and on beyond, still running. Farther down was a grassy nook—on, beyond the road. She went there and hid behind the willows, where she could cry and no one be the wiser. But she could not cry the ache out of her heart, nor the rebellion against the hurt that life had given her. If she could only have burned memory when she burned that clipping! She could still believe and be happy, if only she could forget the things it said.

Phoebe called her, after a long while had passed. Billy Louise bathed her face in the cold water of the Wolverine, used her handkerchief for a towel, and went back to take up the duties life had laid upon her. The doctor's team was hitched to the light buggy he drove, and the doctor was standing in the doorway with his square medicine-case in his hand, waiting to give her a few final directions before he left.

He was like so many doctors; he seemed to be afraid to tell the whole truth about his patient. He stuck to evasive optimism and then neutralized the reassurances he uttered by emphasizing the necessity of being notified if Mrs. MacDonald showed any symptoms of another attack.

"Don't wait," he told Billy Louise gravely. "Send for me at once if she complains of that pain again, or appears—"

"But what is it?" Billy Louise would not be put off by any vagueness.

The doctor told Billy Louise in terms that carried no meaning whatever to her mind. She gathered merely that it was rather serious if it persisted—whatever it was—and that she must not leave her mommie for many hours at a time, because she might have another attack at any time. The doctor told her, however, in plain English that mommie was well over this attack—whatever it was—and that she need only be kept quiet for a few days and given the medicine—whatever that was—that he had left.

"It does seem as if everything is all muffled up in mystery!" she complained, when he drove away. "I can fight anything I can see, but when I've got to go blindfolded—" She brushed her fingers across her eyes and glanced hurriedly into the little looking-glass that hung beside the door. "Yes, mommie, just a minute," she called cheerfully.

She ran into her own room, grabbed a can of talcum, and did not wait to see whether she applied it evenly to her telltale eyelids, but dabbed at them on the way to her mother's room.

"Doctor says you're all right, mommie; only you mustn't go digging post-holes or shoveling hay for awhile."

"No, I guess not!" Her mother responded unconsciously to the stimulation of Billy Louise's tone. "I couldn't dig holes with a teaspoon, I'm that weak and useless. Did he say what it was, Billy Louise?" The sick are always so curious about their illnesses!

"Oh, your lumbago got to scrapping with your liver. I forget the name he gave it, but it's nothing to worry about." Billy Louise had imagination, remember.

"I guess he'd think it was something to worry about, if he had it," her mother retorted fretfully, but reassured nevertheless by the casual manner of Billy Louise. "I believe I could eat a little mite of toast and drink some tea," she added tentatively.

"And an egg poached soft if you want it, mom. Phoebe just brought in the eggs." Billy Louise went out humming unconcernedly under her breath as if she had not a care beyond the proper toasting of the bread and brewing of the tea.

One need not go to war or voyage to the far corners of the earth to find the stuff heroes are made of.



CHAPTER XIV

EACH IN HIS OWN TRAIL

Since nothing in this world is absolutely immutable—the human emotions least of all, perhaps—Billy Louise did not hold changeless her broken faith in Ward. She saw it broken into fragments before the evidence of her own eyes, and the fragments ground to dust beneath the weight of what she knew of his past—things he had told her himself. So she thought there was no more faith in him, and her heart went empty and aching through the next few days.

But, since Billy Louise was human, and a woman—not altogether because she was twenty!—she stopped, after awhile, gathered carefully the dust of her dead faith, and, like God, she began to create. First she fashioned doubts of her doubt. How did she know she had not made a mistake, there at that corral? Other men wore gray hats and rode dark bay horses; other men were slim and tall—and she had only had a glimpse after all, and the light was deceptive down there in the shadows. When that first doubt was molded, and she had breathed into it the breath of life so that it stood sturdily before her, she took heart and created reasons, a whole company of them, to tell her why she ought to give Ward the benefit of the doubt. She remembered what Charlie Fox had said about circumstantial evidence. She would not make the mistake he had made.

So she spent other days and long, wakeful nights. And since it seemed impossible to bring her faith to life again just as it had been, with the glamor of romance and the sweetness of pity and the strength of her own innocence to make it a beautiful faith indeed, she used all her innocence and all her pity and a little of romance and created something even sweeter than her untried faith had been. She had a new element to strengthen it. She knew that she loved Ward; she had learned that from the hurt it had given her to lose her faith in him.

That was the record of the inner Billy Louise which no one ever saw. The Billy Louise which her little world knew went her way unchanged, except in small details that escaped the notice of those nearest her. A look in her eyes, for one thing; a hurt, questioning look that was sometimes rebellious as well; a droop of her mouth, also, when she was off her guard; a sad, tired little droop that told of the weight of responsibility and worry she was carrying.

Ward observed both, the minute he saw her on the trail. He had come across country on the chance that she might be riding out that way, and he had come upon her unawares while she and Blue were staring out over the desert from the height they had attained in the hills.

"'Lo, Bill!" he said, when he was quite close, and held himself ready to meet whatever mood she might present.

She turned her head quickly and looked at him, and the hurt look was still in her eyes, the droop still showed at her lips. And Ward knew they had been there before she saw him.

"Wha's molla, Bill?" he asked, in the tone that was calculated to invite an unburdening of her troubles.

"Ob, nothing in particular. Mommie's been awfully sick, and I'm always worried when I'm away from the ranch, for fear she'll have another spell while I'm gone. The doctor said she might have, any time. Were you headed for our place? If you are, come on; I was just starting back. I don't dare be away any longer." If that were a real unburdening, Ward was an unreasonable young man. Billy Louise looked at him again, and this time her eyes were clear and friendly.

Ward was not satisfied, for all the surface seemed smooth enough. He was too sensitive not to feel a difference, and he was too innocent of any wrongdoing or thinking to guess what was the matter. Guilt is a good barometer of personal atmosphere, and Ward had none of it. The worst of him she had known for more than a year; he had told her himself, and she had healed the hurt—almost—of the past by her firm belief in him and by her friendship. Could you expect Ward to guess that she had seen her faith in him die a violent death no longer than two weeks ago? Such a possibility never occurred to him.

For all that, he felt there was a difference somewhere. It chilled his eagerness a little, and it blanketed his enthusiasm so that he did not tell her the things he had meant to tell. He had ridden over with another nugget in his pocket—a nugget the size of an almond. He had come to give it to Billy Louise and to tell her how and where he had found it.

It is too bad that he changed his mind again and kept that lump of gold in his pocket. It would have explained so much, if he had given it to Billy Louise to put in her blue plush treasure box. It would even have brought to life that first faith in him. She might have told him—one never can foresee the lengths to which a woman's confessional mood will carry her—about that corral hidden in the canyon, and of her sickening certainty that she had seen him ride stealthily away from it. If she had, he would have convinced her that she was mistaken, and that he had that afternoon been washing gold a good ten miles from there, until it was too dark for him to work.

He took the nugget back home, and he took it sooner than he had intended to return. He also carried back a fit of the blues which seemed to have attacked him without cause or pretext, since he had not quarreled with Billy Louise, and had been warmly welcomed by "mommie." Poor mommie was looking white and frail, and her temples were too distinctly veined with purple. Ward told himself that it was no wonder his Wilhemina acted strained and unnatural. He meant to work harder than ever and get his stake so that he could go and make her give him the right to take care of her.

He began to figure the cost of commuting his homestead right away, so that he would not have to "hold it down" for another three years. Maybe she would not want to bring her mother so far off the main road. In that case, he would go down and put that Wolverine place in shape. He had no squeamishness about living on her ranch instead of his own, if she wanted it that way. He meant to be better "hooked up" financially than she was and have more cattle, when he put the gold ring on her finger. Then he would do whatever she wanted him to do, and he would not have to crucify his pride doing it.

You see, they could not have quarreled, since Ward carried castles as well as the blues. In fact, their parting had given Ward an uneven pulse for a mile, for Billy Louise had gone with him as usual as far as the corral, when he started home. And when Ward had picked up his reins and turned to put his toe in the stirrup, Billy Louise had come close—to his very shoulder. Ward had turned his face toward her, and Billy Louise—Billy Louise had impulsively taken his head between her two hands, had looked deep into his eyes, and then had kissed him wistfully on the lips. Then she had turned and fled up the path, waving him away up the trail. And though Ward never guessed that to her that kiss was a penitent vow of loyalty to their friendship and a slap in the face of the doubt-devils that still pursued her weaker moments, it set him planning harder than ever for that stake he must win before he dared urge her further toward matrimony.

It's a wonder that the kiss did not wipe out completely the somber mood that held him. That it did not, but served merely to tangle his thoughts in a most hopeless manner, perhaps proves how greatly the inner life of Billy Louise had changed her in those two weeks.

She changed still more in the next two months, however. There was the strain of her mother's precarious health which kept Billy Louise always on the alert and always trying to hide her fears. She must be quick to detect the first symptoms of a return attack of the illness, and she must not let her mother suspect that there was danger of a return. That much the doctor had made plain to her.

Besides that, there was an undercurrent of gossip and rumors of cattle stealing, whenever a man stopped at the ranch. It worried Billy Louise, in spite of her rebuilt belief in Ward. Doubt would seize her sometimes in spite of herself, and she did not see Ward often enough to let his personality fight those doubts. She saw him just once in the next two months, and then only for an hour or so.

A man rode up one night and stayed with them until morning, after the open-handed custom of the range-land. Billy Louise did not talk with him very much. He had shifty eyes and a coarse, loose-lipped mouth and a thick neck, and, girl-like, she took a violent dislike to him. But John Pringle told her afterwards that he was Buck Olney, the new stock inspector, and that he was prowling around to see if he could find out anything.

Billy Louise worried a good deal, after that. Once she rode out early with the intention of going to Ward's claim to warn him. But three miles of saner thought changed her purpose: she dared not leave her mother all day, for one thing; and for another, she could scarcely warn Ward without letting him see that she felt he needed warning; and even Billy Louise shrank from what might follow.

The stock inspector stopped again, on his way back to the railroad. Billy Louise was so anxious that she smothered her dislike and treated him nicely, which thawed the man to an alarming amiability. She questioned him artfully—trust Billy Louise for that!—and she decided that the stock inspector was either a very poor detective or a very good actor. He did not, for instance, mention any corral hidden in a blind canyon away back in the hills, and Billy Louise did not mention it, either. He had not found any worked brands, he said. And he did not appear to know anything further about Ward than the mere fact of his existence.

"There's a fellow holding down a claim, away over on Mill Creek," he had remarked. "I'll look him up when I come back, though Seabeck says he's all right."

"Ward is all right," asserted Billy Louise, rather unwisely.

"Haven't a doubt of it. I thought maybe he might have seen something that might give us a clew." Perhaps the stock inspector was wiser than she gave him credit for being. He did not at any rate pursue the subject any farther, until he found an opportunity to talk to Mrs. MacDonald herself. Then he artfully mentioned the fellow on Mill Creek, and because she did not know any reason for caution, he got all the information he wanted, and more, for mommie was in one of her garrulous humors.

He went away in a thoughtful mood, and I may as well tell you why. Do you remember that evening when Ward sat before the fire thinking so intently of a man that he pulled a gun on Billy Louise when she startled him? Well, this stock inspector was the man. And this man went away from the Wolverine thinking of Ward quite as intently as Ward sometimes thought of him. If Billy Louise had thrown a chip and hit the stock inspector on the back of the neck, it is very likely that he would have pulled a gun, also. I've an idea that Billy Louise might have done something more than throw a chip at him if she had known who he was; but she did not know, and she slept the sounder for her ignorance.

After that the days drifted quietly for a month and grew nippier at each end and lazier in the middle; which meant that the short summer was over, and that fall was getting ready to paint the wooded slopes with her gayest colors, and that one must prepare for the siege of winter.

It was some time in the latter part of September that Billy Louise got up in the middle of a frosty night because she heard her mother moaning. That was the beginning. She sent John off before daylight for the doctor, and before the next night she stood with her lips pressed together and watched the doctor count mommie's pulse and take mommie's temperature, and drew in her breath hardly when she saw how long he studied the thermometer afterwards.

There was a month or so of going to and fro on her toes and of watching the clock with a mind to medicine-giving. There were nights and nights and nights when the cabin window winked like a star fallen into the coulee, from dusk to red dawn. Ward rode over once, stayed all night, and went home in a silent rage because he could not do a thing.

There was a week of fluctuating hope, and a time when the doctor said mommie must go to a hospital—Boise, since she had friends there. And there was a terrible, nerve-racking journey to the railroad. And when Ward rode next to the Wolverine ranch, there was no Billy Louise to taunt or tempt him. John Pringle and Phoebe told him in brief, stolid sentences of the later developments and gave him a meal and offered him a bed, which he declined.

When the suspense became maddening, after that, he would ride down to the Wolverine for news. And the news was monotonously scant. Phoebe could read and write, after a fashion, and Billy Louise sent her a letter now and then, saying that mommie was about the same, and that she wanted John to do certain things about the ranch. She could not leave mommie, she said. Ward gathered that she would not.

Once when he was at the ranch, he wrote a letter to Billy Louise, and told her that he would come to Boise if there was anything he could do, and begged her to let him know if she needed any money. Beyond that he worked and worked, and tried to crowd the lonesomeness out of his days and the hunger from his dreams, with complete bone-weariness. He did not expect an answer to his letter—at least he told himself that he did not—but one day Phoebe gave him a thin little letter more precious in his eyes than the biggest nugget he had found.

Billy Louise did not write much; she explained that she could only scribble a line or two while mommie slept. Mommie was about the same. She did not think there was anything Ward could do, and she thanked him for offering to help. There was nothing, she said pathetically, that anybody could do; even the doctors did not seem able to do much, except tell her lies and charge her for them. No, she did not need any money, "thank you just the same, Ward." That was about all. It did not sound in the least like Billy Louise.

Ward answered the note then and there, and called her Wilhemina-mine—which was an awkward name to write and cost him five minutes of cogitation over the spelling. But he wanted it down on paper where she could see it and remember how it sounded when he said it, even if it did look queer. Farther along he started to call her Bill Loo, but rubbed it out and substituted Lady Girl (with capitals). Altogether he did better than he knew, for he made Billy Louise cry when she read it, and he made her say "Dear Ward!" under her breath, and remember how his hair waved over his left temple, and how he looked when that smile hid just behind his lips and his eyes. And he made her forget that she had lost faith in him. She needed to cry, and she needed to remember and also to forget some things; for life was a hard, dull drab in Boise, with nothing to lighten it, save a vicarious hope that did not comfort.

Billy Louise was not stupid. She saw through the vagueness of the doctors; and besides, she was so hungry for her hills that she felt like beating the doctors with her fists, because they did nothing to make her mommie well enough to go home. She grew to hate the nurse and her neutral cheerfulness.

That is how the fall passed for Billy Louise, and the early part of the winter.



CHAPTER XV

"YOU WON'T GET ME AGAIN"

One day late in the fall, Ward was riding the hills off to the north and west of his claim, looking at the condition of the range there and keeping an eye out for Y6 cattle. He had bought another dozen head of mixed stock, over toward Hardup, and they were not yet past the point of straying off their new range. So, having keen eyes and the incentive to use them, he paid attention to stock tracks in the soft places, and he saw everything within the sweep of his vision; and, since the day was clear and fine, his range of vision, when he reached a high point, extended to the Three Buttes away out in the desert.

By sheer accident he rode up to the canyon where the little corral lay hidden at the end, and looked down. And since he rode up at an angle different from the one Billy Louise had taken, the corral was directly beneath him—so directly, in fact, that half of it was hidden from sight. He saw that there were cattle within it, however, and two men at work there. And by chance he lifted his eyes and saw the nose of a horse beyond a jutting ledge sixty yards or so away, and the crown of a hat showing just above the ledge; a lookout, he judged instantly, and pulled Rattler behind the rock he had been at some pains to ride around.

Ward was a cowpuncher. He knew the tricks of the trade so well that he did not wonder what was going on down there. He knew. He was tempted to do as Billy Louise had done—ride on and pass up knowledge which might be disagreeable; for Ward was not one to spy upon his fellows, and the man whom he would betray into the hands of a sheriff must be guilty of a most heinous crime. That was his code: To let every fellow have a chance to work out his own salvation or damnation as he might choose. I don't suppose there was anything he hated worse than an informer.

He got behind the rock, since he had no great desire to be shot, and he discovered that his view of the corral was much plainer than from where he had first seen it. He looked behind him for an easy retreat to the skyline, and then before he turned to ride away, he glanced down again curiously.

A man walked out into the center of the corral and stood there in the revealing sunlight. Ward's eyes bored like gimlets through the space that divided them. Instinctively his hand went to the gun on his hip. It was a long pistol shot, and he was afraid he might miss; for Ward was not a wizard with a gun, much as I should like to misrepresent him as a dead shot. He was human, just like yourself. He could shoot pretty well, a great deal better than lots of men who do more boasting than he ever did, but he frequently missed. He measured the distance with his mind while the man stood there talking to someone unseen. To look at Ward's face, you would have sworn that the man was doomed; but something held Ward's finger from crooking on the trigger; the man had his back turned squarely toward the gun. Ward waited. The man did not move. He waited another minute, and then he opened his lips to shout. And when his lips parted for the call that would bring the fellow facing him, Ward's tricky brain snapped before his eyes the face of Billy Louise.

He lowered the gun. He could not shoot when he knew that the bullet would split a gulf between himself and the girl—a gulf that would separate him forever from that future where stood his air castles. Billy Louise had talked to him very seriously one day about this very possibility. She had made him see that shooting this man would be the worst thing he could possibly do.

He let down the hammer with his thumb, slid the gun back into his holster, and dismounted, with a glance toward the place where the lookout was stationed. He was sure he had not been seen, and so he crouched behind a splinter of rock and watched. He had no plan, but his instinct impelled him to closely watch Buck Olney.

Another man came into view, down there in the corral. He also stood plainly revealed, and Ward gave a little snort of contemptuous surprise when he recognized him. After that he studied the situation with scowling brows. This other man either upset his conclusions or complicated his manner of dealing with Buck Olney. Ward would not have hesitated one second about putting the sheriff on the trail of Buck, but if the second man were implicated, he could not betray one without betraying the other. And if the business down there in the corral were lawful, then he must think of some other means. At any rate, the thing to do now was to make sure.

The two in the corral came out and closed the gate behind them, and the first man kicked apart the embers of a small fire and afterward busied himself with the ground—either looking for tracks or covering them Up. They came a little way along the side of the bluff, mounted, and rode up toward where the lookout waited. And one of them rode a dark bay, and was slim and tall, and wore a gray hat.

Ward glanced at Rattler standing half asleep with reins dropped to the ground. He reached out, took the reins, and led the horse farther down under the shelter of the ledge. Rattler pricked up his ears at the sound of those other riders, but he did not show enough interest to nicker a greeting; he was always a self-centered beast and was content to go his way alone, like his master.

Ward stood up, where he could see the rim of the bluff over the ledge of lava rock. He might get a closer view and see who was the look out, and he might be seen; for that contingency he kept his fingers close to his gun. He heard their scrambling progress. Now and then one of the horses sent a little rock bounding down into the canyon, whereat the cattle on the corral moved restlessly around the small inclosure.

They came closer, after they had gained the top. Ward, leaning against the dull-gray rock before him, heard the murmur of their voices. Once he caught the unmistakable tones of the man he would like to kill. "I'll keep cases and git him." Plotting against some poor devil, as usual, Ward thought, and wondered if the man knew he lived in this part of the country; if he did, it might easily be—

"I'll keep cases some myself, you damned reptile," he muttered under his breath. "You won't get me again, if that's what you've got in mind."

They went on, and presently Ward was looking at their backs as they rode over the ridge. He stood for some time staring after them with what Billy Louise called his gimlet look. He was breathing shortly from the pressure he had put upon his self-control, and he was thinking—thinking.

The silence came creeping in on the heels of the faint, interrupted sound of their voices. Ward took a long breath, discovered that he was gripping his gun as though his life depended on hanging to it, and rubbed his numbed fingers absently. After a minute or so, he mounted and rode down to the corral.

Five dry cows and two steers snorted at his approach and crowded against the farther rails. Ward gave Rattler a touch of the spurs, rode close to the fence, and stood in his stirrups while he studied the bunch.

"Hell!" he said, when the inspection was over, and dropped back into the saddle while he gazed unseeingly at the canyon wall. It was a very real hell that his mind saw; a hell made by men, wherein other men must dwell in torment because of their sins or the sins of their fellows.

Seabeck's brand was a big V, a bad brand to own, since it favors revision at the hands of the unscrupulous. These cattle were Seabeck cattle, and their brand had been altered. For the right slant of the V had been extended a little and curled into a 6, so that in time the brand would stand casual inspection as a Y6 monogram—Ward's own brand. The work was crude—purposefully crude. The V bad not been reburned enough to make it look fresh, and the newly seared 6 had been added with a malevolent pressure that would make it stand out a fresh brand for a long time—in case of a delay in the proceedings, as Ward knew perfectly well.

So he sat there and looked over the fence and saw himself a convicted "rustler." There was the evidence, all ready to damn him utterly before a jury. They would be turned loose on the range near his claim, and they would be found before the scabs had haired over. It was a good time for rustling; round-ups were over for the winter, and the weather would confine range-riding to absolute necessity.

Of course, the work was coarse—so coarse as to reflect against his intelligence; but when brands are worked over and the culprit has been caught, the law is not too careful to give the prisoner credit for brains.

Ward stared at the altered brands and wondered what he had best do. He bethought him that perhaps it would be as well to put a little scenery between himself and that particular locality, and he started back up the hill. Once he pulled up as if he would go back, but he thought better of it. It was out of the question to turn those cattle loose. He could not kill them and dispose of the bodies—not when there were seven of them. He might go down and blotch the brands so that they would not read anything at all. He had thought of that before and decided against it. That would put those three on their guard and would probably not benefit him in the long run. They could work the brands on other cattle.

He hunched forward in the saddle and let Rattler choose his own trail up the hill. Though he did not know it, trouble had caught Billy Louise in that same place, and had sent her forward with drooping shoulders and a mind so absorbed that she gave no attention to her horse; but that is merely a trifling coincidence. The thing he had to decide was far more complicated than Billy Louise's problem.

Should he go straight to Seabeck and tell him what he had found out? He did not know Seabeck, except as he had met him once or twice on the trail and exchanged trivial greetings and a few words about the weather. Besides, Seabeck would very soon find out—

There it stood at his shoulder, grinning at him malevolently—his past. It tied his hands. Buck Olney he could deal with single-handed; for Olney had the fear of him that is born of a guilty conscience. He could send Buck "over the road" whenever he chose to tell some things he knew; he could do it without any compunctions, too. Buck Olney, the stock inspector, deserved no mercy at Ward's hands; and would get none, if ever they met where Ward would have a chance at him.

Olney he could deal with, alone. But with the evidence of those rebranded cattle, and the testimony of two men, together with the damning testimony of his past! Ward lifted his head and stared heavily at the pine slope before him. He could not go to Seabeck and tell him anything. In the black hour of that ride, he could not think of anything that he could do that would save him.

And then quite suddenly, in his desperation, he decided upon something. He laughed hardly, turned Rattler back from the homeward trail, and returned to the corral in the canyon. "They started this game, and they've put it up to me," he told himself grimly, "and they needn't squeal if they burn their own fingers."

He hurried, for he had some work ahead of him, and the sun was sliding past the noon mark already. He reached the corral and went about what he had to do as if he were working for wages and wanted to give good measure.

First, he rebuilt the little fire just outside the corral where the cattle could not trample it, but where one might thrust a branding iron into its midst from between the rails. When it was going properly, he searched certain likely hiding-places and found an iron still warm from previous service. He thrust it in to heat, led Rattler into the corral, and closed the gate securely behind him. Then he mounted, took down his rope and widened the loop, while his angry eyes singled out the animal he wanted first.

Ward was not an adept with a "running iron"; he was honest, whatever men might say of him. But he knew how to tie down an animal, and he sacrificed part of his lariat to get the short rope he needed to tie their feet together. He worked fast—no telling what minute someone might come and catch him—and he did his work well, far better and neater than had his predecessors.

When he left that corral, he smiled. Before he had ridden very far up the bluff, he stopped, looked down at the long-suffering cattle, and smiled again sardonically. One could read their brands easily from where he sat on his horse. They were not blotched; they were very distinct. But they were not Y6s within that corral. There were other brands which might be made of a Y6 monogram, by the judicious addition of a mark here and a mark there.

"There, damn yuh: chew on that awhile!" he apostrophized the absent three. He turned away and rode back once more toward home.

Rattler turned naturally into the trail which ran up the creek to the ranch, but Ward immediately turned him out of it. "We aren't going to overlook any bets, old-timer," he said grimly and crossed the creek at a point where it was too rocky to leave any hoof-prints behind them. He rode up the lower point of the ridge beyond and followed the crest of it on the side away from the valley. When he reached a point nearly opposite his cabin, he dismounted, unbuckled his spurs, and slipped their chains over the saddle-horn. Then he went forward afoot to reconnoitre. He was careful to avoid rock or gravelly patches and to walk always on the soft grass which muffled his steps.

In this wise he made his way to the top of the ridge, where he could look down upon the cabin and stable and corrals and see also the creek trail for a good quarter of a mile. The little valley lay quiet. His team fed undisturbed by the creek not far from the corral, which reassured Ward more than anything. Still, he waited until he had made reasonably sure that the bluff held no watcher concealed before he went back to where Rattler waited patiently.

"I guess they didn't plan to stir things up till they got those critters planted where they wanted them," he mused, while he rode down the bluff to his cabin. "But when they visit that bunch of stock again, I reckon things will begin to tighten!"

He was wary of exposing himself too much to view from the bluff while he did his chores that night, and he kept Rattler in the stable. Also, he slept very little, and before daybreak he was up and away. He had a rolled army blanket tied behind the saddle, a sack of grub and a frying-pan and a bucket for coffee. But he did not go any farther than the wolf-den, and he spent a couple of hours removing as well as he could any suspicious traces of having dug anything more than wolf pups from the bank on the ledge.



CHAPTER XVI

"I'M GOING TO TAKE YOU OUT AND HANG YOU"

The trouble with a man like Buck Olney is that you can never be sure of his method, except that it will be underhand and calculated to eliminate as much as possible any risk to himself. Ward, casting back into his memory—he had known Buck Olney very well, once upon a time, and in his unsuspecting youth had counted him a friend—tried to guess how Buck would proceed when he went down to that corral and found how those brands had been retouched.

"He'll be running around in circles for awhile, all right," he deduced with an air of certainty. "Blotched brands he'd know was my work; and he could have put it on me, too, with a good yarn about trailing me so close I got cold feet. As it is—" Ward smoked two cigarettes and scowled at the scenery. As it was, he did not know just what Buck Olney would do, except— "If he makes a guess I did that, he'll know I'm wise to the whole plant. And he'll get me, sure, providing I stand with my back to him long enough!" Ward had his back to a high ledge, at that moment, so that he did not experience any impulse to look behind him.

"Buck don't want to drag me up before a jury," he reasoned further. "He'd a heap rather pack me in all wrapped up in a tarp, and say how he'd caught me with the goods, and I resisted arrest."

The assurance he felt as to what Buck Olney would do did not particularly frighten Ward, even if he did neglect to go to bed in his cabin during the next few days. That was common sense, born of his knowledge of the man he was dealing with. He went to the cabin warily, just often enough to give it an air of occupancy. He frequently sat upon some hilltop and watched a lazy thread of smoke weave upward from his rusty stovepipe, but he slept out under the stars rolled in his heavy blanket, and he never crossed a ridge if he could make his way through a hollow. It is not always cowardice which makes a man extremely careful not to fall into the hands of his enemy. There is a small matter of pride involved. Ward would have died almost any death rather than give Buck Olney the satisfaction of "getting" him. For a few days he was cautious as an Indian on the war trail, and then his patience frazzled out under the strain.

At sunrise one morning, after a night of shivering in his blanket, he hunched his shoulders in disgust of his caution. If Buck Olney wanted anything of him, he was certainly taking his time about coming after it. Ward rubbed his fingers over his stubbly jaw, and the uncomfortable prickling was the last small detail of discomfort that decided him. He was going to have a shave and a decent cup of coffee and eat off his own table, or know the reason why, he promised himself while he slapped the saddle on Rattler.

He was camped in a sheltered little hollow in the hills, where the grass was good and there was a spring. It was a mile and more to his claim, straight across the upland, and it was his habit to leave Rattler there and walk over to the ridge, where he could watch his claim; frequently, as I have said, he stole down before daylight and lighted a fire in the stove, just to make it look as if he lived there. There was a risk in that, of course, granting that the stock inspector was the kind to lie in wait for him.

Ward rode to the ridge, with his blanket rolled and tied behind the cantle. His frying-pan hung behind his leg, and his rifle lay across the saddle in front of him. He was going home boldly enough and recklessly enough, but he was by no means disposed to walk deliberately into a trap. He kept his eye peeled, as he would have expressed it. Also, he left Rattler just under the crest of the ridge, took off his spurs, and with his rifle in his hands went forward afoot, as he had done every time he had approached his cabin since the day he found the corral and the cattle in the canyon.

In this wise he looked down the steep slope with the sun throwing the shadow of his head and shoulders before him. The cabin window blinked cheerfully in the sunlight. His span of mares were coming up from the meadow—in the faint hope of getting a breakfast of oats, perhaps. The place looked peaceful enough and cozily desirable to a man who has slept out for four nights late in the fall; but a glance was all Ward gave to it.

His eyes searched the bluff below him and upon either side. Of a sudden they sharpened. He brought his rifle forward with an involuntary motion of the arms. He stood so for a breath or two, looking down the hill. Then he went forward stealthily, on his toes; swiftly, too, so that presently he was close enough to see the carbuncle scar on the neck of the man crouched behind a rock and watching the cabin as a cat watches a mouse-hole. A rifle lay across the rock before the man, the muzzle pointing downward. At that distance, and from a dead rest, it would be strange if he should miss any object he shot at. He had what gamblers call a cinch, or he would have had, if the man he watched for had not been standing directly behind him, with rifle-sights in a line with the scar on the back of his thick neck.

"Throw up your hands!" Ward called sharply, when his first flare of rage had cooled to steady purpose.

Buck Olney jumped as though a yellow-jacket had stung him. He turned a startled face over his shoulder and jerked the rifle up from the rock. Ward raised his sights a little and plugged a round, black-rimmed hole through Buck's hat crown.

"Throw up your hands, I told you!" he said, while the hills opposite were still flinging back the sound of the shot, and came closer.

Buck grunted an oath, dropped the rifle so suddenly that it clattered on the rock, and lifted his hands high, in the quiet sunlight.

"Get up from there and go on down to the shack—and keep your hands up. And remember all the reasons I've got for wanting to see you make a crooked move, so I'll have an excuse to shoot." Ward came still closer as he spoke. He was wishing he had brought his rope along. He did not feel quite easy in his mind while Buck Olney's hands were free. He kept thinking of what Billy Louise had said to him about shooting this man, and it was the first time since he had known her that he disliked the thought of her.

Buck got up awkwardly and went stumbling down the steep slope, with his hands trembling in the air upon either side of his head. From their nervous quivering it was evident that his memory was good, and that it was working upon the subject which Ward had suggested to him. He did not give Ward the weakest imitation of an excuse to shoot. And so the two of them came presently down upon the level and passed around the cabin to the door, with no more than ten feet of space between them—so inexorably had Ward crowded close upon the other's stumbling progress.

"Hold on a minute!"

Buck stopped as still as though he had gone against a rock wall.

Ward came closer, and Buck flinched away from the feel of the rifle muzzle between his shoulder blades. Ward reached out a cautious hand and pulled the six-shooter from its scabbard at Buck's right hip.

"Got a knife? You always used to go heeled with one. Speak up—and don't lie about it."

"Inside my coat," grunted Buck, and Ward's lip curled while he reached around the man's bulky body and found the knife in its leather sheath. Evidently Buck was still remembering with disquieting exactness what reasons Ward might have for wanting to kill him.

"Take down your left hand and open the door."

Buck did so and put his hand up again without being told.

"Now go in and stand with your face to the wall." With the rifle muzzle, Ward indicated which wall. He noticed how Buck's fingers groped and trembled against the wall, just under the eaves, and his lip curled again in the expression which Billy Louise so hated to see.

Ward had chosen the spot where he could reach easily a small coil of rope. He kept the rifle pressing Buck's shoulders until he had shifted the knife into one hand, leaned, and laid its blade against Buck's cheek.

"Feel that? I'll jab it clear through you if you give me a chance. Drop your hands down behind you." He spent a busy minute with the rope before he pushed Buck Olney roughly toward a chair.

Buck sat down, and Ward did a little more rope-work.

"Say, Ward, you're making a big mistake if you—"

"Shut up!" snapped Ward. "Can't you see I'm standing all I can stand, just with the sight of you? Don't pile it on too thick by letting me hear you talk. I heard you once too often as it is."

Buck Olney caught his breath and sat very still. His eyes followed Ward as the eyes of a caged animal follow its keeper.

Ward tried to ignore his presence completely while he lighted a fire and fried bacon and made coffee, but the hard set of his jaw and the cold intentness of his eyes proved how conscious he was of Buck's presence. He tried to eat just to show how calm he was, but the bread and bacon choked him. He could feel every nerve in his body quiver with the hatred he felt for the man, and the bitterness which the sight of him called up out of the past. He drank four cups of coffee, black and sweetened at random, which steadied him a little. That he did not offer Buck food or drink showed how intense was his hatred; as a rule, your true range man is hospitable even to his enemies.

He rose and inspected the ropes to make sure that they were proof against twisting, straining muscles, and took an extra turn or two with the loose end, just to make doubly sure of the man's helplessness.

"Where did you leave your horse?" he asked him curtly, when he was through.

Buck told him, his eyes searching Ward's face for mercy—or at least for some clew to his fate—and dulling with disappointment because he could read nothing there but loathing.

Without speaking again, Ward went out and closed the door firmly behind him. He felt relieved to be away from Buck's presence. As he climbed the bluff and mentally relived the last hour, he wondered how he had kept from shooting Buck as soon as he saw him. Still, that would have defeated his main purpose, which was to make Buck suffer. He was afraid he could not make Buck suffer as Buck had made him suffer, because there were obstacles in the path of a perfect retribution.

Ward was not cruel by nature; at least he was not more cruel than the rest of us; but as he went after Rattler and Buck's horse, it pleased him to know that Buck Olney was tied hand and foot in his cabin, and that he was sick with dread of what the future held for him.

Ward was gone an hour. He did not hurry; there was no need. Buck could not get away, and a little suspense would do him good.

Buck's face was pasty when Ward opened the door. His eyes were a bit glassy. And from the congested appearance of his hands, Ward judged that he had tested to the full his helplessness in his bonds. Ward looked at him a minute and got out the makings of a smoke. His mood had changed in his absence. He no longer wanted absolute silence between them; instead, he showed symptoms of wanting to talk.

"If I turn you loose, Buck, what will you do?" he asked at last, in a curious tone.

"If you—Ward, I'll prove I'm a friend to yuh in spite of the idea you've got that I ain't. I never done nothing—"

"No, of course not." Ward's lip curled. "That was my mistake, maybe. You always used to say you were my friend, when—"

"And that's the God's truth, Ward!" Buck's face was becoming flushed with his eagerness. "I done everything I could for you, Ward, but the way the cards laid I couldn't—"

"Get me hanged. I know; you sure tried hard enough!" Ward puffed hard at his cigarette, and the lips that held it trembled a little. Otherwise he seemed perfectly cool and calm.

"Say, Ward, them lawyers lied to you."

"Oh, cut it out, Buck. I've seen you wriggle through a snake-hole before. I believe you're my friend, just the way you've always been."

"That's right, Ward, and I can prove it."

Ward snorted. "You proved it, old-timer, when you laid up there behind a rock with your sights on this shack, ready to get me when I came out. I sabe now how it happened Jim McGuire was found face down in the spring behind his shack, with a bullet hole in his back, that time. You were his friend, too!"

"Ward, I—"

"Shut up. I just wanted to see if you'd changed any in the last seven years. You haven't, unless it's for the worse. You've got to the end of the trail, old-timer. When you went laying for me, you fixed yourself a-plenty. Do you want to know what I'm going to do with you?"

"Ward, you wouldn't dare shoot me! With the record you've got, you wouldn't stand—"

"Who gave it to me, huh? Oh, I heap sabe; you've left word with your pardners that you were coming up here to arrest me single-handed. They will give the alarm, if you don't show up; and I'll go on the dodge and get caught and—" Ward threw away his cigarette and took a step toward his captive; a step so ominous that Buck squirmed in his bonds.

"Well, you can rest easy on one point. I'm not going to shoot you." Ward stood still and watched the light of hope flare in the eyes of his enemy. "I'm going to wash the dishes and take a shave—and then I'm going to take you out somewhere and hang you."

"My God, Ward! You—you—"

"I told you, seven years ago," went on Ward steadily, "that I'd see you hung before I was through with you. Remember? By rights you ought to hang by the heels, over a slow fire! You're about as low a specimen of humanity as I ever saw or heard of. You know what you did for me, Buck. And you know what I told you would happen; well, it's going to come off according to the programme.

"I did think of running you in and giving you a taste of hell yourself. But, as usual, you've gone and tangled up a couple of fellows that never did me any particular harm and I don't want to hand them anything if I can help it. So I'll just string you up—after awhile, when I get around to it—and leave a note saying who you are, and that you're the head push in this rustling business, and that you helped spend the money that Hardup bank lost awhile back; and that you're one of the gazabos—"

"You can't prove it! You—"

"I don't have to prove it. The authorities will do all that when they get the tip I'll give them. And you, being hung up on a limb somewhere, can't very well give your pardner the double-cross; so they'll have a fighting chance to make their getaway.

"Now I'm through talking to you. What I say goes. You can talk if you want to, Buck; but I'm going to carve a steak out of you every time you open your mouth." He pulled Buck's own knife out of its sheath and laid it convenient to his hand, and he looked as if he would do any cruel thing he threatened.

He relighted the fire, which had gone out long ago, and set the dish-pan on the stove with water to heat. He remade his bunk, spreading on the army blanket which he took from the saddle on Rattler. He swept the floor as neatly as any woman could have done it and laid the two wolf-skins down in their places where they did duty as rugs. He washed and wiped his few dishes, keeping Buck's knife always within reach and sending an inquiring glance toward Buck whenever that unhappy man made the slightest movement, though truth to tell, Buck did not make many. He brought two pails of water and set them on the bench inside, and in the meantime he had cooked a mess of prunes and set them in a bowl on the window-sill beside his bunk, where the air was coolest. He stropped his razor painstakingly and shaved himself in leisurely fashion and sent an occasional glance toward his prisoner from the looking-glass, which made Buck swallow hard at his Adam's apple.

And Buck, during all this time, never once opened his lips, except to lick his tongue across them, and never once took his eyes off Ward.

"I've sure put the fear of the Lord into you, haven't I, Buck?" Ward observed maliciously, wiping a blob of hairy lather upon a page torn from an old Sears-Roebuck catalogue. "I was kinda hoping you had more nerve. I wanted to get a whack at you, just to prove I'm not joshing."

Buck swallowed again, but he made no reply.

Ward washed his face in a basin of steaming water, got a can of talcum out of the dish cupboard, and took the soap-shine off his cheeks and chin. He combed his hair before the little mirror—trying unavailingly to take the wave out of it with water, and leaving it more crinkly over his temples than it had been in the first place—and retied the four-in-hand under the soft collar of his shirt.

"I wish you'd talk, Buck," he said, turning toward the other. He looked very boyish and almost handsome, except for the expression of his eyes, which gave Buck the shivers, and the set of his lips, which was cruel. "I've read how the Chinks hand out what they call the death-of-a-thousand-cuts; I was thinking I'd like to try it out on you. But—oh, well, this is Friday. It may as well go as a hanging." He made a poor job of his calm irony, but Buck was not in the mental condition to be critical.

The main facts were sufficiently ominous to offset Ward's attempt at facetiousness. Indeed, the very weakness of the attempt was in itself ominous. Ward might try to be coldly malevolent, but the light that burned in his eyes, and the rage that tightened his lips, gave the lie to his forced composure.

He went out and led up the horses to the door. He came back and started to untie Buck Olney's feet, then bethought him of the statement he had promised to write. He got a magazine and tore out the frontispiece—which, oddly enough, was a somber picture of Death hovering with outstretched wings over a battlefield—and wrote several lines in pencil on the back of it, where the paper was smooth and white.

"How's that?" he asked, holding up the paper so that Buck could read what he had written. "I ain't in the mood to sit down and write a whole book, so I had to boil down your pedigree. But that will do the business all right, don't you think?"

Buck read with staring eyes, looked into Ward's face, and opened his lips for protest or pleading. Then he followed Ward's glance to the knife on the table and shut his mouth with a snap. Ward laughed grimly, picked up the knife, and ran his thumb lightly over the edge to test its keenness. "Put a fresh edge on it for me, huh?" he commented. "Well, we may as well get started, I reckon. I'm getting almighty sick of seeing you around."

He loosened the rope that hound Buck to the chair and stood scowling down at him, drawing in a corner of his lip and biting it thoughtfully. Then he took his revolver and held it in his left hand, while with his right he undid the rope which hound Buck's hands.

"Stick your hands out in front of you," he commanded. "You'll have to ride a ways; there isn't any gallows tree in walking distance."

"For God's sake, Ward!" Buck's voice was hoarse. The plea came out of its own accord. He held his hands before him, however, and he made no attempt to get out of the chair. He knew Ward could shoot all right with his left hand, you see. He had watched him practice on tin cans, long ago when the two were friends.

"You know what I told you," Ward reminded him grimly and took up the knife with a deadly air that made the other suck in his breath. "Hold still! I'm liable to cut your throat if I make a mislick."

Really, it was the way he did it that made it terrible. The thing itself was nothing. He merely drew the back of the blade down alongside Buck's ear, and permitted the point to scratch through the skin barely enough to let out a thin trickle of blood. A pin would have hurt worse. But Buck groaned and believed he had lost an ear. He breathed in gasps, but did not say a word.

"Go ahead; talk all you want to, Buck," Ward invited, and wiped the knife-blade on Buck's shoulder before he returned the weapon to its sheath in his inside coat pocket.

Buck flinched from the touch and set his teeth. Ward tied his hands before him and told him to get up and go out to his horse. Buck obeyed with abject submissiveness, and Ward's lip curled again as he walked behind him to the door. He had not the slightest twinge of pity for the man. He was gloatingly glad that he could make him suffer, and he inwardly cursed his own humanity for being so merciful. He ought to have cut Buck's ear off slick and clean instead of making a bluff at it, he told himself disgustedly. Buck deserved it and more.

He helped Buck into the saddle, took the short rope in his hands, and hobbled Buck's feet under the horse, grasped the bridle-reins, and mounted Rattler. Without a word he set off up the rough trail toward Hardup, leading Buck's horse behind him.



CHAPTER XVII

"SO-LONG, BUCK!"

"Before you go, Buck, I want to tell you that you needn't jolly yourself into thinking your death will be avenged. It won't. You noticed what I wrote; and there isn't a scrap of my writing anywhere in the country to catch me up—" Ward's thoughts went to Billy Louise, who had some very good samples, and he stopped suddenly. He was trying not to think of Billy Louise, to-day. "Also, when somebody happens to ride this way and sees you, I won't be anywhere around."

"This is the tree," he added, stopping under a cottonwood that flung a big branch out over the narrow cow-trail they were traveling. "The chances are friend Floyd will be ambling around this way in a day or two," he said hearteningly. "He can tend to the last sad rites and take charge of your horse. He's liable to be sore when he reads your pedigree, but I don't reckon that will make a great deal of difference. You'll get buried, all right, Buck."

Ward dismounted with a most businesslike manner and untied Buck Olney's rope from the saddle. "I can't spare mine," he explained laconically. He had some trouble in fashioning a hangman's noose. He had not had much practice, he remarked to Buck after the first attempt.

"How do you do it, Buck? You know more about these things than I do," he taunted. "You've helped hang lots of poor devils that will be glad to meet yuh in hell to-day."

Buck Olney moistened his dry lips. Ward glanced at his face and looked quickly away. Staring, abject terror is not nice to look upon, even though the man is your worst enemy and is suffering justly for his sins. Ward's fingers fumbled the rope as though his determination were weakening. Then he remembered some things, hunched his shoulders, impatient of the merciful impulse, and began the knot again. An old prospector had shown him once how it was done.

"Of course, a plain slip-knot would do the business all right," he said. "But I'll try and give you the genuine thing, same as you gave the other fellows."

"Ward, for God's sake, let me go!"

Ward started. He did not know that a man's voice could change so much in so short a time. He never would have recognized the tones as coming from Buck Olney's loose, complacent lips.

"Ward, I'll never—I'll leave the country—I'll go to South America, or Australia, or—"

"You'll go to hell, Buck," Ward cut in inexorably. "You've got your ticket."

"I'll own up to everything. I'll tell you where some of the money's cached we got in that Hardup deal, Ward. There's enough to put you on Easy Street. I'll tell you who helped—"

"You'd better not," advised Ward harshly, "or I'll make hanging a relief to you. I know pretty well, right now, all you could tell. And if I wanted to send your pardners up, I wouldn't need your help. It's partly to give them a chance that I'm sending you out this way, myself. I don't call this murder, Buck. I'm saving the State a lot of time and trouble, that's all; and your pardners the black eye they'd get for throwing in with you. I heap sabe who was the head push. You got them in to take whatever dropped, so you could get off slick and clean, just as you've done before, you—you—"

Buck Olney got it then, hot from the fires of Ward's wrath. A man does not brood over treachery and wrong and a blackened future for years, without storing up a good many things that he means to say to the friend who has played him false. Ward had been a happy-go-lucky young fellow who had faith in men and in himself and in his future. He had lived through black, hopeless days and weeks and months, because of this man who tried now to buy mercy with the faith of his partners.

Ward stood up and let the rope trail forgotten from his hands while he told Buck Olney all the things he had brooded over in bitterness. He had meant to keep it all down, but it was another instance of bottled emotions, and Buck, with his offer of a fresh bit of treachery, had pulled the cork. Ward trembled a little while he talked, and his face grew paler and paler as he dug deep into the blackest part of the past, until when he finished he was a tanned white. He was shaking at the last; shaking so that he staggered to the tree and leaned against it weakly, while he fumbled for tobacco and papers.

In the saddle Buck sat all hunched together as if Ward had lashed him with rawhide instead of with stinging words. The muscles of his face twitched spasmodically. His eyes were growing bloodshot.

Ward spilled two papers of tobacco before he got a cigarette rolled and lighted. He wondered a little at the physical reaction from his outburst, but he wondered more at Buck Olney sitting alive and unhurt on the horse before him—a Seabeck horse which Ward had seen Floyd Carson riding once or twice. He wondered what Floyd would do if he saw Buck now and the use to which the horse was being put.

Ward finished the cigarette, rolled another, and smoked that also before he could put his hand out before him and hold it reasonably steady. When he felt fairly sure of himself again, he lifted his hat to wipe off the sweat of his anger, gave a big sigh, and returned to the tying of the hangman's noose.

When he finally had it fixed the way he wanted it, he went close and flung the noose over Buck Olney's head. He could not trust himself to speak just then. He cast an inquiring glance upward, took Buck's horse by the bridle, and led him forward a few steps so that Buck was directly under the overhanging limb. Then, with the coil of Buck's rope in his hand, he turned back and squirmed up the tree-trunk until he had reached the limb. He crawled out until he was over Buck's bullet-punctured hat-crown, sliced off what rope he did not need, and flung it to the ground. He saw Buck wince as the rope went past him. The pinto horse shied out of position.

"Take the reins and bring him back here!" Ward called shortly, and gave a twitch of the rope as a hint.

Mechanically Buck obeyed. He did not know that the rope was not yet tied to the limb.

Ward tied the rope securely, leaving enough slack to keep Buck from choking prematurely. He fussed a minute longer, with his lip curled into a grin of sardonic humor. Then he crawled hack to the trunk of the tree and slid down carefully so that he would not frighten the pinto.

He went up and took the hobble off Buck Olney's feet, felt in the seam of his coat-lapel, and pulled out four pins, with which he fastened Buck's "pedigree" between Buck's shrinking shoulder-blades. Then he stood off and surveyed his work critically before he went over to Rattler, who stood dozing in the sunshine.

"Sorry I can't stay to see you off," he told Buck maliciously. "I've decided to let you go alone and take your own time about starting. As long as that cayuse stands where he is, you're safe as a church. And you've got the reins; you can kick off any time you feel like it. Sabe?" He studied Buck's horror-marked face pitilessly.

"You've got about one chance in a million that you can make that pinto stand there till someone comes along," he pointed out impartially. "I'm willing to give you that chance, such as it is. And if you're lucky enough to win out on it—well, I'd advise you to do some going! South America is about as close as you'll be safe. Folks around here are going to know all about you, old-timer, whether they get to read what's on your back or not.

"And, on the other hand, it's a million-to-one shot you'll land where your ticket reads. I'd hate to gamble on that horse standing in one spot for two or three days, wouldn't you?" He wheeled Rattler unobtrusively, his eye on the pinto. "I hope he don't try to follow," he said. "I want you to have a little time to think about the things I said to you. Well, so-long."

Ward rode back the way he had come, glancing frequently over his shoulder at Buck, slumped in the saddle with a paper pinned to his back like a fire-warning on a tree, and his own grass rope noosed about his neck and connecting him with the cottonwood limb six feet above his hat crown.

Ward had not ridden a hundred yards before he heard Buck Olney scream hysterically for help. He grinned sourly with his eyebrows pinched together and, that hard, strained look in his eyes still. "Let him holler awhile!" he gritted. "Do him good, damn him!"

Until distance and the intervening hills set a wall of silence between, Ward heard Buck screaming in fear of death, screaming until he was so hoarse he could only whisper; screaming because he had not seen Ward take his knife and slice the rope upon the limb so that it would not have held the weight of a rabbit.



CHAPTER XVIII

FORTUNE KICKS AGAIN

It was past noon when Ward rode down the steep slope to the creek bank just above his cabin. He was sunk deep in that mental depression which so often follows close upon the heels of a great outburst of passion. Mechanically he twitched the reins and sent Rattler down the last shelf of bank—and he did not look up to see just where he was. Rattler was a well-trained horse, since he was Ward's. He obeyed the rein signal and stepped off a two-foot bank into a nest of loose-piled rocks that slid treacherously under his feet. Sure-footed though he was, he stumbled and fell; and it was sheer instinct that took Ward's feet from the stirrups in time.

Ward sprawled among the rocks, dazed. The shock of the fall took him out of his fit of abstraction, and he pulled away from Rattler as the horse scrambled up and stood shaking before him. He tried to scramble up also....

Ward sat and stared stupidly at his left leg where, midway between his knee and his foot, it turned out at an unnatural angle. He thought resentfully that he had had enough trouble for once, without having a broken leg on top of it all.

"Now this is one hell of a fix!" he stated dispassionately, when pain had in a measure cooled his first anger. He looked around him like a man who is taking stock of his resources. He was not far from the cabin. He could get there by crawling. But what then?

Ward looked at Rattler, standing docilely within reach of his hand. He considered getting on—if he could, and riding—well, the nearest place was fifteen miles. And that was a good, long way from a doctor. He glanced again at the cabin and tried to study the situation impersonally. If it were some other fellow, now, what would Ward advise him to do under the circumstances?

He reached down and felt his leg gingerly. So far as he could tell, it was a straight, simple break—snapped short off against a rock, he judged. He shook his head over the thought of riding fifteen miles with those broken bones grinding their edges together. And still, what else could he do?

He reached out, took the reins, and led Rattler a step nearer, so that he could grasp the stirrup. With his voice he held the horse quiet while he pulled himself upright upon his good leg. Then, with pain-hurried, jerky movements, he pulled off the saddle, glanced around him, and flung it behind a buck-brush. He slipped off the bridle, flung that after the saddle, and gave Rattler a slap on the rump. The horse moved away, and Ward stared after him with set lips. "Anyway, you can look after yourself," he said and balanced upon his right leg while he swung around and faced the cabin. It was not far—to a man with two sound legs. A hundred yards, perhaps.

Ward crawled there on his hands and one knee, dragging the broken leg after him. It was not a nice experience, but it served one good purpose: It wiped from his mind all thought of that black past wherein Buck had figured so shamefully. He had enough to think of with his present plight, without worrying over the past.

In half an hour or so Ward rested his arms upon his own doorstep and dropped his perspiring face upon them. He lay there a long while, in a dead faint.

After awhile he moved, lifted his head, and looked about him dully at first and then with a certain stoical acceptance of his plight. He looked into the immediate future and tried to forecast its demands upon his strength and to prepare for them. He crawled farther up on the step, reached the latch, and opened the door. He crawled in, pulled himself up by the foot of his bunk, and sat down weakly with his head in his hands. Like a hurt animal, he had obeyed his instinct and had crawled home. What next?

If Ward had been a weaker man, he would have answered that question speedily with his gun. He did think of it contemptuously as an easy way out. If he had never met Billy Louise, he might possibly have chosen that way. But Ward had changed much in the past two years, and at the worst he had never been a coward. His hurt was sending waves of nausea over him, so that he could not concentrate his mind upon anything. Then he thought of the bottle of whisky he kept in his bunk for emergencies. Ward was not a man who drank for pleasure, but he had the Western man's faith in a good jolt of whisky when he felt a cold coming on or a pain in his stomach—or anything like that. He always kept a bottle on hand. A quart lasted him a long time.

He felt along the footboard of the bunk till his fingers touched the bottle, drew it out from its hiding-place—he hid it because stray callers would have made short work of it—and, placing the uncorked bottle to his trembling lips, swallowed twice.