Force, I ran across a bull-whacker on the Whoop Up trail, and he told me that the Double R had closed out. He said Hank had got into a ruction with Dick Feltz—you recollect there was considerable feeling between them in our time down there—and killed him one day at Fort Worth. Feltz had some folks that took it up, and Hank had to spend a barrel of money to come clear. That, and a range war that grew out of the killing, and some kind of a business deal just about broke them. That's the way this fellow had it; said a trail-boss told him at Ogalalla that spring. I didn't take much stock in the yarn at the time, but I'm beginning to think he had it straight. You didn't hear anything about it?"

"Not a word; it's news to me," I said. "When I left that country I kept moving north all the time. The last three years I've been in the Judith Basin, and southern outfits haven't begun to come in there yet. So I haven't had much chance to hear from that part of the world. But I'm framing up my think-works so I won't be surprised at anything I see or hear after to-night. How long since you left that country, Mac?"

"Next spring after you did," he answered. "If they did go broke, I can sabe their being here. Rutter said, you know, that they'd made a stake on the Peace—Peace River, I suppose he meant. There's been a lot of placer mining in that north country the last three or four years. They might have been up there and struck it good and plenty. They made their start in the cow business off a placer in California, you know."

I knew that, for Rowan often spoke of it. And granting that we had surmised rightly, it required no vivid imagination to picture what might happen to men crossing those wide prairies with a fortune in yellow dust. But my imagination was hardly equal to the task of reconciling the fact that the evil pair had been busy at other deviltry and yet knew I carried a large sum of money and where it was concealed about my person. That brought me back to something else Rutter had told us; something that I knew—or thought I knew—touched MacRae very closely.

"Hans said Lyn was at Walsh," I remarked. "I don't think she was there, this morning. But she might be due to arrive there. Hang it all, Mac, what the dickens chased you away from the Canadian?"

"Looking back, I can't just say what it was," he presently replied, in a hard, matter-of-fact tone. "You see, one's feelings can change, Sarge. It looks different to me now than it did then. I reckon I could have written essays on the futility of sentiment, and the damned silliness of a man who thinks he cares for a woman. But I'm past that stage. And so I can't say for sure just how it was or why. Something came up between me and Lyn—and I drifted, and kept drifting. Went through Colorado, Wyoming, Montana; finally rambled here, and went into the Force because—well, because a man with anything to him can go to the top. A man must play at something, and this looked like a good game."

There was a note of something that I'd never heard in MacRae's voice before; neither bitterness nor anger nor sorrow nor lonesomeness, and yet there was a hint of each, but so slight, so elusive I couldn't grasp it. I remembered that the last sentence MacRae had spoken to me in the South was a message to Lyn Rowan, a message that I never had the pleasure of delivering, for my hasty flitting took me out other trails than the one that led to the home ranch. And so they had parted—gone different ways—probably in anger. Well, that's only another example of the average human's cussedness. Lyn could be just as haughty as she was sweet and gracious, which was natural enough, seeing she'd ruled a cattle king and all his sunburned riders since she was big enough to toddle alone; and Gordon MacRae wasn't the sort of man who would come to heel at any woman's bidding—at least, he wasn't in the old days. Oh, I could understand how it happened, all right. Each of them was chuck full of that dubious sort of pride that has busted up more than one love-fiesta.

Neither of us spoke again, and at length the squat log buildings of Pend d' Oreille loomed ahead of us in the night. Tired and hungry, we stabled our horses, ate a bite, and rolled into bed.

CHAPTER VI.

STONY CROSSING.

"There's Stony Crossing, Sarge; and over yonder, at the west end of that blue ridge, is Writing-on-the-Stone."

At the foot of the long slope on which we stood Milk River glinted in the sunshine, deceptively beautiful—a shining example of the truth of that old saw about distance lending enchantment, for, looking down on the placid stream slipping smoothly along between fringes of scrubby timber, one would never guess that miles and miles of hungry quick-sands lined the river-edge, an unseen trap for the feet of the unwary.

Stony Crossing I could see, even without Mac's guiding finger. The Whoop Up trail, a brown streak against the vivid upland green, dipped down the hillside to our right, down to the sage-grown flat, and into the river by the great boulders that gave the ford its name. The blue ridge up the river I gave scant heed to; the Writing-Stone was only a name to me, for I'd never seen the place. My attention was all for the scene at hand. The patch of soft green that I knew for the cottonwoods Rutter had spoken of drew my roving gaze whether I would or no. I have ridden on pleasanter missions than the one that took us to Stony Crossing that day.

"It's sure tough," I voiced a thought that had been running in my mind all morning, "to think that a good old fellow like Hank Rowan has been murdered and left to rot on the prairie like a skinned buffalo. Hanged if I can make myself really believe we'll find him down there."

"The more I think of it, the more I'm inclined to believe that we will," MacRae answered evenly. "We'll know beyond a doubt in the next hour. So we might as well go on."

If I hadn't known him so well I might have thought he didn't care a damn what we found at Stony Crossing, that he was as unmoved as the two case-hardened troopers who rode with us. But that repression was just as natural to him as emotional flare-ups are to some. Whatever he felt he usually kept bottled up inside, no matter how it hurt. I never saw him fly to pieces over anything. He was something of an anomaly to me, when I first knew him. I was always so prone to do and say things according to impulse that I thought him cold-blooded, a man without any particular feeling except a certain pride in holding his own among his fellows.

But I revised my opinion when I came to know him better. Under the surface he was sensitive as a girl; one could wound him with a word or a look. Paradoxically, he was absolutely cold-blooded toward a declared enemy. He would fight fair, but without mercy. Side by side with the sensitive soul of him, and hidden always under an impassive mask of self-control, lay the battling spirit, an indomitable fighting streak; it cropped out in a cool, calculating manner of taking desperate chances when the sleeping devil in him was roused. He would sidestep trouble—and one met the weeping damsel at many turns of the road in those raw days—if he could do it without loss of self-respect; but the man who stirred him up needlessly, or crowded him into retaliation, always regretted it—when he had time to indulge in vain regrets. And you can bet your last, lone peso, and consider it won, that MacRae meant every word when he said to old Hans Rutter: