going to die for this!"

It was an hour after sundown when they reached the wagon with all that
was earthly of Bangs lashed across the blue horse and it was midnight
before the five men who had followed the trail returned with the word
that they had been unable to even sight the man they tracked.

During the next week the girl inwardly accused the men of
heartlessness. They jested as carelessly as if nothing unusual had
occurred and she heard no mention of Bangs. It seemed that it took but
a day for them to forget a former comrade who had come to an untimely
end. Rile Foster had disappeared but on the fifth day he turned up at
the Three Bar wagon and resumed his work without the least explanation
of his absence.

The old man was gloomy and silent, his face set in sorrowful lines as
he went about his work, and it was evident that he was continually
brooding over the fate of the youth he had loved. It seemed to the
girl that the men were even more cheerful and thoughtless than usual,
that they concerned their minds with every conceivable topic except
that which was uppermost in her own. The death of Bangs had affected
them not at all.

She could not shake off the remembrance of the boy's adoring gaze as
his eyes had followed every move she made and in some vague way she
felt that she was responsible for the accident. She often rode near
Rile Foster, knowing what was in his mind. He spoke but little and, in
common with the rest, he never once mentioned Bangs.

At the end of a week Slade rode up to the wagon as the men were working
the cows gathered in the second circle of the day. He jerked his head
to draw her aside out of range of Waddles's ears.

"How's the Three Bar showing up this spring?" he asked abruptly.

"Better than ever," she retorted and he caught a note of defiance in
her voice.

"You're lying, Billie," he asserted calmly. "The Three Bar will show
another shrinkage this year."

"How do you know?" she flashed; and the distrust of him that Harris had
roused in her, lately submerged beneath the troubling thoughts of
Bangs, was suddenly quickened and thrown uppermost in her mind. In
gauging him from this new angle she sensed a ruthlessness in him that
was not confined solely to business efficiency; he would crush her
interests without a qualm if it would gain his end.

"I know," he asserted. "It's my business to know everything that goes
on anywhere near my range. There's not another outf