ghts with her slim attractiveness. Town hadn't
spoiled her, he thought glowingly. She was the same good little
pal,--only she was growing up pretty fast, now. She was a young lady
already.

So, thinking of her with the brightening of spirits which is the first
symptom of the world-old emotion called love, Lite rounded the eastern
arm of the bluff and came within sight of the coulee spread before him,
shaped like the half of a huge platter with a high rim of bluff on
three sides.

His first involuntary glance was towards the house, and there was
unacknowledged expectancy in his eyes. But he did not see Jean, nor any
sign that she had returned. Instead, he saw her father just mounting
in haste at the corral. He saw him swing his quirt down along the side
of his horse and go tearing down the trail, leaving the wire gate flat
upon the ground behind him,--which was against all precedent.

Lite quickened his own pace. He did not know why big Aleck Douglas
should be hitting that pace out of the coulee, but since Aleck's pace
was habitually unhurried, the inference was plain enough that there was
some urgent need for haste. Lite let down the rails of the barred gate
from the meadow into the pasture, mounted, and went galloping across
the uneven sod. His first anxious thought was for the girl. Had
something happened to her?

At the stable he looked and saw that Jean's saddle did not hang on its
accustomed peg inside the door, and he breathed freer. She could not
have returned, then. He turned his own horse inside without taking off
the saddle, and looked around him puzzled. Nothing seemed wrong about
the place. The sorrel mare stood placidly switching at the flies and
suckling her gangling colt in the shady corner of the corral, and the
chickens were pecking desultorily about their feeding-ground in
expectation of the wheat that Jean or Lite would fling to them later
on. Not a thing seemed unusual.

Yet Lite stood just outside the stable, and the sensation that
something was wrong grew keener. He was not a nervous person,--you
would have laughed at the idea of nerves in connection with Lite Avery.
He felt that something was wrong, just the same. It was not altogether
the hurried departure of Aleck Douglas, either, that made him feel so.
He looked at the house setting back there close to the bluff just where
it began to curve rudely out from the narrowest part of the coulee. It
was still and quiet, with clos