f the watery miles
That God let down from the firmament.
Lo! Duty and Love, and a true man's trust;
Your forehead to God and your feet in the dust--

Yes, that was his country; it had taken hold of him with that grip
which no man ever has shaken his heart free from, no matter how many
seas he has placed between its mystic lure and his back-straining
soul. Its fight was his fight, and there was gladness in the thought.

His alertness as he went down the slope, and the grim purpose of his
presence in that forbidden place, did not prevent the pleading of a
softer cause, and a sweeter. That rare smile woke in his eyes and
unbent for a moment the harshness of his lips as he thought of brown
hair sweeping back from a white forehead, and a chin lifted
imperiously, as became one born to countenance only the exalted in
this life. There was something that made him breathe quicker in the
memory of her warm body held a transitory moment in his arms; the
recollection of the rose-softness of her lips. All these were waiting
in the world that he must win, claimed by another, true. But that was
immaterial, he told his heart, which leaped and exulted in the memory
of that garden path as if there was no tomorrow, and no such shadow in
man's life as doubt.

Of course, there remained the matter of the glove. A man might have
been expected to die before yielding it to another, as she had said,
speaking out of a hot heart, he knew. There was a more comfortable
thought for Alan Macdonald as he went down the long slope with the
western sun on his face; not a thought of dying for a glove, but of
living to win the hand that it had covered.

Chadron's ranchhouse was several miles to the westward of him,
although it appeared nearer by the trickery of that clear light. He
cut his course to bring himself into the public highway--a government
road, it was--that ran northward up the river, the road along which
Chadron's men had pursued him the night of the ball. He meant to
strike it some miles to the north of Chadron's homestead, for he was
not looking for any more trouble than he was carrying that day.

He proceeded swiftly, but cautiously, watching for his man. But Mark
Thorn did not appear to be abroad in that part of the country. Until
sundown Macdonald walked unchallenged, when he struck the highway a
short distance south of the point where the trail leading to Fort
Shakie branched from it.

Saul Chadron and his daughter Nola