ry eyes turned longingly
toward those grassy vales.

There had been frost for many nights past; the green of the summerland
had merged into a yellow-brown, now gold beneath the slanting
sunbeams. A place of friendly beauty and sequestered peace, where a
man might come to take up his young dreams, or stagger under the
oppression of his years to put them down, and rest. It seemed so, in
the light of that failing afternoon.

But the man who sat with his back against the ledge, his ears strained
to find the slightest hostile sound, his roaming eyes always coming
back with unconscious alertness and frowning investigation to the
nearer objects in the broken foreground, had tasted beneath the
illusive crust of that land, and the savor was bitter upon his lips.
He questioned what good there was to be got out of it, for him or
those for whom he had taken up the burden, for many a weary year to
come.

The gloom of the situation bore heavily upon him; he felt the
uselessness of his fight. He recalled the words of Frances Landcraft:
"There must be millions behind the cattlemen." He felt that he never
had realized the weight of millions, iniquitous millions, before that
hour. They formed a barrier which his shoulder seemed destined never
to overturn.

There he was, on that broad heath, afoot and alone, hunting, and
hunted by a slayer of men, one who stalked him as he would a wolf or a
lion for the bounty upon his head. And in the event that a lucky shot
should rid the earth of that foul thing, how much would it strengthen
his safety, and his neighbors', and fasten their weak hold upon the
land?

Little, indeed. Others could be hired out of those uncounted millions
of the cattlemen's resources to finish what Mark Thorn had begun. The
night raids upon their fields would continue, the slanders against
them would spread and grow. Colonel Landcraft believed him to be what
malicious report had named him; there was not a doubt of that. And
what Frances thought of him since that misadventure of the glove, it
was not hard to guess.

But that was not closed between them, he told himself, as he had told
himself before, times unnumbered. There was a final word to be said,
at the right time and place. The world would turn many times between
then and the Christmas holidays, when Frances was to become the bride
of another, according to the colonel's plans.

Macdonald was weary from his night vigils and stealthy prowlings by
day, and hun