ram
to her was his tribute to her honesty, an evidence of his trust in her,
despite his uttered suspicions. Also, it was his surrender.

She looked up, intending to thank him. He was walking away, and did
not look around at her call.

CHAPTER XXI

HIS FATHER'S FRIEND

Betty did not see Calumet again that day, and only at mealtime on the
day following. He had nothing to say to her at these times, though it
was plain from the expression on his face when she covertly looked at
him that he was thinking deeply. She hoped this were true; it was a
good sign. On the morning of the third day he saddled the black horse
and rode away, telling Bob, who happened to be near him when he
departed, that he was going to Lazette.

It was fully two hours after supper when he returned. Malcolm, Dade,
and Bob had gone to bed. In the kitchen, sitting beside the table, on
which was a spotlessly clean tablecloth, with dishes set for one--she
had saved Calumet's supper, and it was steaming in the warming-closet
of the stove--Betty sat. She was mending Bob's stockings, and thinking
of her life during the past few months--and Calumet. And when she
heard the black come into the ranchhouse yard--she knew the black's
gait already--she trembled a little, put aside her mending, and went to
the window.

The moon threw a white light in the yard, and she saw Calumet dismount.
When he did not turn the black into the corral, hitching him, instead,
to one of the rails, without even removing the saddle, she suspected
that something unusual had happened.

She was certain of it when she heard Calumet cross the porch with a
rapid step, and if in her certainty there had been the slightest doubt,
it disappeared when he opened the kitchen door.

He looked tired; he had evidently ridden hard, for the alkali dust was
thick on his clothing; he was breathing fast, his eyes were burning
with some deep emotion, his lips were grim and hard.

He closed the door and stood with his back against it, looking at her.
Something had wrought a wonderful change in him. He was not the
Calumet she had known--brutal, vicious, domineering, sneering; though
he was laboring under some great excitement, suppressing it, so that to
an eye less keen than hers it might have seemed that he had been
undergoing some great physical exertion and was just recovering from
it. It seemed to her that he had found himself; that that regeneration
for which she had hoped had c