yelps were music to Columbine.
She rode on down the trail in the gathering darkness, less afraid of the
night and its wild denizens than of what awaited her at White
Slides Ranch.

CHAPTER II

Darkness settled down like a black mantle over the valley. Columbine
rather hoped to find Wilson waiting to take care of her horse, as used
to be his habit, but she was disappointed. No light showed from the
cabin in which the cowboys lived; he had not yet come in from the
round-up. She unsaddled, and turned Pronto loose in the pasture.

The windows of the long, low ranch-house were bright squares in the
blackness, sending cheerful rays afar. Columbine wondered in trepidation
if Jack Belllounds had come home. It required effort of will to approach
the house. Yet since she must meet him, the sooner the ordeal was over
the better. Nevertheless she tiptoed past the bright windows, and went
all the length of the long porch, and turned around and went back, and
then hesitated, fighting a slow drag of her spirit, an oppression upon
her heart. The door was crude and heavy. It opened hard.

Columbine entered a big room lighted by a lamp on the upper table and by
blazing logs in a huge stone fireplace. This was the living-room, rather
gloomy in the corners, and bare, but comfortable, for all simple needs.
The logs were new and the chinks between them filled with clay, still
white, showing that the house was of recent build.

The rancher, Belllounds, sat in his easy-chair before the fire, his big,
horny hands extended to the warmth. He was in his shirt-sleeves, a
gray, bold-faced man, of over sixty years, still muscular and rugged.

At Columbine's entrance he raised his drooping head, and so removed the
suggestion of sadness in his posture.

"Wal, lass, hyar you are," was his greeting. "Jake has been hollerin'
thet chuck was ready. Now we can eat."

"Dad--did--did your son come?" asked Columbine.

"No. I got word jest at sundown. One of Baker's cowpunchers from up the
valley. He rode up from Kremmlin' an' stopped to say Jack was
celebratin' his arrival by too much red liquor. Reckon he won't be home
to-night. Mebbe to-morrow."

Belllounds spoke in an even, heavy tone, without any apparent feeling.
Always he was mercilessly frank and never spared the truth. But
Columbine, who knew him well, felt how this news flayed him. Resentment
stirred in her toward the wayward son, but she knew better than to
voice it.

"Natural like,