he boy, throwing his arm round his father's shoulder,
"thanks to you, dear old dad,--and to God."

CHAPTER II

ON THE RED PINE TRAIL

On the Red Pine trail two men were driving in a buckboard drawn by a
pair of half-broken pinto bronchos. The outfit was a rather ramshackle
affair, and the driver was like his outfit. Stewart Duff was a rancher,
once a "remittance man," but since his marriage three years ago he had
learned self-reliance and was disciplining himself in self-restraint.
A big, lean man he was, his thick shoulders and large, hairy muscular
hands suggesting great physical strength, his swarthy face, heavy
features, coarse black hair, keen dark eyes, deepset under shaggy
brows, suggesting force of character with a possibility of brutality in
passion. Yet when he smiled his heavy face was not unkindly, indeed the
smile gave it a kind of rugged attractiveness. He was past his first
youth, and on his face were the marks of the stormy way by which he had
come.

He drove his jibing bronchos with steady hands. No light touch was his
upon the reins, and the bronchos' wild plunging met with a check
from those muscular hands of such iron rigidity as to fling them back
helpless and amazed upon their hocks.

His companion was his opposite in physical appearance, and in those
features and lines that so unmistakably reveal the nature and character
within. Short and stout, inclined indeed to fat, to his great distress,
his thick-set figure indicated strength without agility, solidity
without resilience. He had a pleasant, open face, with a kindly,
twinkling blue eye that goes with a merry heart, with a genial, sunny
soul. But there was in the blue eye and in the open face, for all the
twinkles and the smiles, a certain alert shrewdness that proclaimed the
keen man of business, and in the clean cut lips lay the suggestion of
resolute strength. A likable man he was, with an infinite capacity
for humour, but with a bedrock of unyielding determination in him that
always surprised those who judged him lightly.

The men were friends, and had been comrades more or less during those
pioneer days that followed their arrival in the country from Scotland
some dozen years ago. Often they had fallen out with each other, for
Duff was stormy of temper and had a habit of letting himself swing out
upon its gusts of passion, reckless of consequences; but he was ever the
one to offer amends and to seek renewal of good relations. H