cottonwoods Rutter had
spoken of drew my roving gaze whether I would or no. I have ridden on
pleasanter missions than the one that took us to Stony Crossing that
day.

"It's sure tough," I voiced a thought that had been running in my mind
all morning, "to think that a good old fellow like Hank Rowan has been
murdered and left to rot on the prairie like a skinned buffalo. Hanged
if I can make myself really believe we'll find him down there."

"The more I think of it, the more I'm inclined to believe that we will,"
MacRae answered evenly. "We'll know beyond a doubt in the next hour. So
we might as well go on."

If I hadn't known him so well I might have thought he didn't care a damn
what we found at Stony Crossing, that he was as unmoved as the two
case-hardened troopers who rode with us. But that repression was just as
natural to him as emotional flare-ups are to some. Whatever he felt he
usually kept bottled up inside, no matter how it hurt. I never saw him
fly to pieces over anything. He was something of an anomaly to me, when
I first knew him. I was always so prone to do and say things according
to impulse that I thought him cold-blooded, a man without any particular
feeling except a certain pride in holding his own among his fellows.

But I revised my opinion when I came to know him better. Under the
surface he was sensitive as a girl; one could wound him with a word or a
look. Paradoxically, he was absolutely cold-blooded toward a declared
enemy. He would fight fair, but without mercy. Side by side with the
sensitive soul of him, and hidden always under an impassive mask of
self-control, lay the battling spirit, an indomitable fighting streak;
it cropped out in a cool, calculating manner of taking desperate chances
when the sleeping devil in him was roused. He would sidestep
trouble--and one met the weeping damsel at many turns of the road in
those raw days--if he could do it without loss of self-respect; but the
man who stirred him up needlessly, or crowded him into retaliation,
always regretted it--when he had time to indulge in vain regrets. And
you can bet your last, lone _peso_, and consider it won, that MacRae
meant every word when he said to old Hans Rutter: "We'll make them sweat
blood for this."

When we got down into the bottom Mac turned aside to the deep-worn trail
and glanced sharply down at the ruts. The dust in them lay smooth, and
the hoof-marks that showed were old and dim.

"I wondered if th