o the very young.

It was in his mind to slap a saddle on his bronco and ride after her.
But why? Could he by sheer dominance of will change her opinion of
him? She had grounded it on good and sufficient reasons. He was
associated in her mind with the greatest humiliation of her life, with
the stinging lash that had cut into her young pride and her buoyant
courage as cruelly as it had into her smooth, satiny flesh. Was it
likely she would listen to any regrets, any explanations? Her hatred
of him was not a matter for argument. It was burnt into her soul as
with a red-hot brand. He could not talk away what he had done or the
thing that he was.

She had come upon him by chance while he was asleep. He guessed that
Angus McRae's party had reached Whoop-Up and had stopped to buy
supplies and perhaps to sell hides and pemmican. The girl had probably
ridden out from the stockade to the open prairie because she loved to
ride. The rest needed no conjecture. In that lone land of vast spaces
travelers always exchanged greetings. She had discovered him lying
in the grass. He might be sick or wounded or dead. The custom of the
country would bring her straight across the swales toward him to find
out whether he needed help.

Then she had seen who he was--and had ridden away.

A sardonic smile of self-mockery stamped for a moment on his brown
boyish face the weariness of the years.

CHAPTER VII

THE MAN IN THE SCARLET JACKET

Morse ambled out at a road gait to take his turn at guard duty. He was
following the principle that the longest way round is the shortest
road to a given place. The reason for this was to ward off any
suspicion that might have arisen if the watchers had always come and
gone by the same trail. Therefore they started for any point of the
compass, swung round in a wide detour, and in course of time arrived
at the cache.

There wasn't any hurry anyhow. Each day had twenty-four hours, and a
fellow lived just as long if he didn't break his neck galloping along
with his tail up like a hill steer on a stampede.

To-day Morse dropped in toward the cache from due west. His eyes
were open, even if the warmth of the midday sun did make him sleepy.
Something he saw made him slip from the saddle, lead his horse into a
draw, and move forward very carefully through the bunch grass.

What he had seen was a man crouched behind some brush, looking down
into the little gorge where the whiskey cache was--a man in