en eyed him askance;
though they were merely envious over his winnings and inclined to admire
the manner in which he had shown his disapproval of the dealer's
attempt at cheating.

He dreaded Mason's return, and yet he was anxious to see him and tell
him, once for all, that he was not to be trusted. He held aloof from Jim
and he was scantily civil to Dick Thomas, whose friendship rang false.
He pushed the work ahead while the air was still alive with swirls of
mote-like snowflakes, and himself bore the brunt of it just to dull that
gnawing self-disgust which made his waking hours a mental torment.

Before, when disgust had seized upon him in Sunset, it had been an
abstract rebellion against the futility of life as he was living it.
This was different: This was a definite, concrete sense of failure to
keep faith with himself and with Mason; the sickening consciousness of a
swinish return to the wallow; a distrust of himself that was beyond any
emotion he had ever felt in his life.

So, for a week of hard work and harder thinking. Mason sent word by a
migratory cowboy, who had stopped all night at the ranch and whom he had
hired and sent on to camp, that he would not return to the round-up,
and that Ford was to go ahead as they had planned. That balked Ford's
determination to turn the work over to Mason and leave the country, and,
after the first day of inner rebellion, he settled down insensibly to
the task before him and let his own peculiar moral problem wait upon his
leisure. He did not dream that the cowboy had witnessed his chastisement
of the gambler and had gleefully, and in perfect innocence, recounted
the incident at the Double Cross ranch, and that Mason had deliberately
thrown Ford upon his own resources in obedience to his theory that
nothing so braces a man as responsibility.

Ford went about his business with grim industry and a sureness of
judgment born of his thorough knowledge of range work. There was the
winnowing process which left the bigger, stronger calves in charge of
two men, at a line camp known locally as Ten Mile, and took the younger
ones on to the home ranch, where hay and shelter were more plentiful and
the loss would be correspondingly less.

Not until the last cow of the herd was safe inside the big corral
beyond the stables, did Ford relax his vigilance and ride over to where
Ches Mason and Buddy were standing in the shelter of the stable, waiting
to greet him.

"Good boy!" cried M