d from him without
a word, mounted his horse, and rode away.

Brown stood watching him until he was out of sight. "My God,
forgive me," he cried, "what a mess I made of that! I have lost
him and the boy too;" and with that he passed into the woods,
coming home to his wife and baby late at night, weary, spent,
and too sad for speech or sleep.

CHAPTER XV

THE MAIDEN OF THE BROWN HAIR

Rumours of the westward march of civilization had floated from time
to time up the country from the main line as far as the Crossing,
and had penetrated even to the Night Hawk ranch, only to be allayed
by succeeding rumours of postponement of the advance for another year.

It was Mackenzie who brought word of the appearance of the first
bona fide scout of the advancing host.

"There was a man with a big flag over the Creek yonder," he announced
one spring evening, while the snow was still lying in the hollows,
"and another man with a stick or something, and two or three behind him."

"Ah, ha!" exclaimed French, "surveyors, no doubt; they have come
at last."

"And what will that be?" said Mackenzie anxiously.

"The men who lay out the route for the railroad," replied French.

Mackenzie looked glum. "And will they be putting a railroad across
our ranch?" he asked indignantly.

"Right across," said French, "and just where it suits them."

"Indeed, and it wouldn't be my land they would be putting that
railroad over, I'll warrant ye."

"You could not stop them, Mack," said French; "they have got the
whole Government behind them."

"I would be putting some slugs into them, whateffer," said Mackenzie.
"There will be no room in the country any more, and no sleeping at
night for the noise of them injins."

Mackenzie was right. That surveyor's flag was the signal that waved
out the old order and waved in the new. The old free life, the only
life Mackenzie knew, where each man's will was his law, and where law
was enforced by the strength of a man's right hand, was gone forever
from the plains. Those great empty spaces of rolling prairie, swept
by viewless winds, were to be filled up now with the abodes of men.
Mackenzie and his world must now disappear in the wake of the red man
and the buffalo before the railroad and the settler. To Jack French
the invasion brought mingled feelings. He hated to surrender the
untrammelled, unconventional mode of life, for which twenty years ago
he had left an ancient and, as it seemed to