he
lumber-camp some day soon.

Judith, held at the office by a lot of first-of-the-month details, did
not get away until close to eleven o'clock that morning. Then she rode
swiftly down the river, a purpose of her own in mind. At the store she
stopped for a sympathetic word with Charlie Miller who had long ago
forgotten his own hurt in his grief and anger that he had lost her
thousand dollars for her.

"What's a thousand dollars, Charlie?" she laughed at him. "We'll lose
and make many a thousand before the year dies."

Just below the Lower End settlement she came upon Doc Tripp. He was in
one of the quarantine hog-corrals, his sleeves rolled up, a puzzled
look of worry puckering his boyish face.

"What's up, Doc?" asked Judith.

"Don't know, Judy. That's what gets my mad up. Just performed an
autopsy on one of your Poland-China gilts."

"Found it dead?" asked Judith.

"Killed it," grunted Tripp. "Sick. Half dozen more are off their feed
and don't look right. A man's always afraid of the cholera. And,"
stubbornly, "I won't believe it! There's been no chance of infection;
why, there's not an infected herd this side of the Bagley ranch, sixty
miles the other side of Rocky Bend, a clean hundred miles from here.
But, just the same, I'm taking temperatures this morning and having my
herders cut out all the dull-looking ones and break the herds up."

"Not getting nerves? Are you, Doc?" And Judith spurred on down the
valley.

Before she came to the spot where Bud Lee's horse had been shot she
came upon Lee himself. A rifle across his arm, he was looking up at
the cliffs of Squaw Creek canon.

"Well, Lee," she said, "what do you make of it?"

He showed no surprise at seeing her and answered slowly, that far-away
look in his eyes as though he were alone still and speaking simply to
Bud Lee.

"Using smokeless powder nowadays is a handy thing for a man shooting
under cover," he said. "Then rig up your gun with a silencer and get
off at fair range, half a mile and up, with a telescope sight, and it's
real nice fun picking folks off!"

"All of that spells preparation," suggested Judith.

He nodded. When he offered no further remark but sat staring up at the
cliffs, Judith asked:

"What else have you learned by coming back down here? Anything?"

"There were two men, anyway. I'd guess, three. The one who stuck up
Charlie and then drifted while the drifting was good. Then the two
other jaspers t