lugged him, I reckon," he said, nodding toward the vast distance
into which his enemy was disappearing. "Why, it's plumb ridiculous.
If my girl would plug me that way, I'd sure feel--"

His meaning was plain, though he did not finish. She looked at him
straight in the eyes though her face was crimson and her lips trembled
a little.

"You are a brute!" she said. Turning swiftly she began to descend the
slope toward the ranchhouse.

Calumet stood looking after her for a moment, his face working with
various emotions that struggled for expression. Then, ignoring Dade,
who stood near him, plainly puzzled over this enigma, he walked over to
the edge of the wood where Taggart's rifle lay, picked it up and made
his way to the ranchhouse.

CHAPTER XVII

MORE PROGRESS

A strange thing was happening to Calumet. His character was in the
process of remaking. Slowly and surely Betty's good influence was
making itself felt. This in spite of his knowledge of her secret
meeting with Neal Taggart. To be sure, so far as his actions were
concerned, he was the Calumet of old, a man of violent temper and
vicious impulses, but there were growing governors that were
continually slowing his passions, strange, new thoughts that were
thrusting themselves insistently before him. He was strangely
uncertain of his attitude toward Betty, disturbed over his feelings
toward her. Despite his knowledge of her secret meeting with Taggart,
with a full consciousness of all the rage against her which that
knowledge aroused in him, he liked her. At the same time, he despised
her. She was not honest. He had no respect for any woman who would
sneak as she had sneaked. She was two-faced; she was trying to cheat
him out of his heritage. She had deceived his father, she was trying
to deceive him. She was unworthy of any admiration whatever, but
whenever he looked at her, whenever she was near him, he was conscious
of a longing that he could not fight down.

And there was Dade. He often watched Dade while they were working
together on the bunkhouse in the days following the incident of the
ambush by Taggart. The feeling that came over him at these times was
indescribable and disquieting, as was his emotion whenever Dade smiled
at him. He had never experienced the deep, stirring spirit of
comradeship, the unselfish affection which sometimes unites the hearts
of men; he had had no "chum" during his youth. But this feeling that
cam