oan outside, the old sorrow came storming
up in him, and the sense of loss.

"What have I been doing?" he murmured at length. He shrugged away his
last thoughts. "I drifted about for a while after the pardon came down
from the governor. People knew me, you see, and what they knew about me
didn't please them. Even today Jim Silent and Jim Silent's crew isn't
forgotten. Then don't look at me like that, Kate; no, I played straight
all the time---then I ran into Buck and he and I had tried each other
out, we had at least one thing in common"--here he looked at Buck and
they both flushed--"and we made a partnership of it. We've been together
five years now."

"I knew you could break away, Lee. I used to tell you that."

"You helped me more than you knew," he said quietly.

She smiled and then turned to escape him. "And now you, Buck?"

"Since then we've made a bit of coin punching cows and we've blown it in
again prospecting. Blown it in? Kate, we've shot enough powder to lift
that mountain yonder but all we've got is color. You could gild the sky
with what we've seen but we haven't washed enough dust to wear a hole in
a tissue-paper pocket. I'll tell you the whole story. Lee packs a jinx
with him. But--Haines, did you ever see a lion as big as that?"

The dimness of evening had grown rapidly through the room while they
talked and now the light from the door was far less than the glow of the
fire. The yellow flicker picked out a dozen pelts stretching as rugs on
the floor or hanging along the wall; that to which Buck pointed was an
enormous skin of a mountain lion stretched sidewise, for if it had been
hung straight up a considerable portion of the tail must have dragged on
the floor. Buck went to examine it. Presently he exclaimed in surprise
and he passed his fingers over it as though searching for something.

"Where was it shot, Kate? I don't find nothin' but this cut that looks
like his knife slipped when he was skinnin'."

"It was a knife that killed it."

"What!"

"Don't ask me about it; I see the picture of it in my dreams still. The
lion had dragged the trap into a cave and Bart followed it. Dan went in
pushing his rifle before him, but--when he tried to fire it jammed."

"Yes?" they cried together.

"Don't ask me the rest!"

They would hardly have let her off so easily if it had not been for the
entrance of Joan who had come back on account of the darkness. Black
Bart went promptly to a corner of the