icked up his lantern and turned back into his bar, closing and
securing his door behind him. Then, with keen anticipation and
enjoyment, he approached his till and proceeded to count his day's
takings.

* * * * * *

Bob Whitstone unhitched his horse from Ju's tying post. He swung
himself into the saddle and rode away,--away toward his outland home
under the starlit roof of the plains. It was an almost nightly journey
with him now, for the saloon habit had caught him in its toils, and was
already holding him firmly.

His mood was not easy. He resented Ju Penrose. He resented all men of
his type. He knew him for a crook. He believed he possessed no more
conscience than any other habitual criminal. But his resentment was
the weak echo of an upbringing which had never intended him for such
association, and, in spite of it, the man's personality held him, and
its strength dominated him.

His way took him out across an almost trackless waste of rich
grass-land. Somewhere out there, hidden away at the foot of the
Cathills, lay his homestead, and the wife for whom he had abandoned all
that his birth had entitled him to. During the past two years he had
learned truly all that he had sacrificed for the greatest of all dreams
of youth.

But these things, for the moment, were not in his mind. Only Penrose.
Ju Penrose, whom he had learned to detest and despise out of the
educated mind that was his. The man's final homily was entirely lost
upon Bob. Such was his temper that only the gross outrages against the
precepts of his youth remained. He only heard the hateful, detestable
cynicism, brutally expressed. It was something curious how he only
took note of these things, and missed the rough solicitude of Ju's
final admonishment. But he was young and weak, and a shadow of
bitterness had entered his life, which, at his age, should have found
no place in it.

The miles swept away under his horse's hoofs. Already the township,
that sparse little oasis of shelter in a desert of grass-land, lay lost
behind him in the depths of some hidden trough in the waves of the
prairie ocean, The great yellow disc of the moon had cut the horizon
and lit his tracks, but its light was still unrevealing and only added
charm to the blaze of summer jewels which adorned the soft velvet of
the heavens.

He glanced back. But almost instantly his eyes were turned again
ahead. The night scene of these p