. And they had gone. Who could it be?
Was he after all to find a clue to the man who had maimed his horse?

Looking about him curiously it chanced that he found something that
drove a puzzled frown into his eyes. It had caught in the frayed edge of
the rug, and to have been so caught and so left meant that it had been
done during the struggle he had already pictured. He took it up into his
hand, trying to understand. For it was the rowel of a spur, a tiny,
sharp, shining rowel that had come loose from a spur he remembered very
well. And he remembered, too, that Winifred Waverly had had her spurs on
when she came out to him at the barn!

"It happened while I was out after the horses!" He sat down, the shining
spiked wheel lying in the palm of his hand, his brows drawn heavily.
"While I was out there ... it happened. Some jasper came in here, there
was some sort of a tussle ... and she didn't say a damned word about
it!"

Yes, he was certain now that something had happened during the brief
time between his going out for the horses and the girl's coming to him
at the barn. Something that had changed her, that had killed her
friendliness toward him, that had made her cold and cruelly different.

"The same man who slipped his knife across my horse's foot came in here
and saw her while I was out for the horses," he said slowly. "The same
man. It must have been. And she could tell me who it was and she
didn't. Why? After they had struggled here, too! Why?"

He could see no reason in it all, no reason for her silence, no reason
for a man's malicious cruelty to a horse. Nor were these the only things
which he could not understand. Groping for the truth, he began carefully
to run over the things which had seemed strange to him and which now
struck him as being connected in some plan darkly hidden.

The girl was Henry Pollard's niece. He began with that fact. She was on
her way to Pollard's and on an errand which the banker Templeton had
called mad and dangerous. Some man had followed her, a man whom she had
twice seen on the trail and whose outfit resembled Thornton's, resembled
it too closely to be the result of chance! The same headstall with the
red tassel, the same grey neck-handkerchief, a sorrel horse....

"By God!" whispered the cowboy, a sudden light in his eyes, "he lamed my
horse so it would limp the same as his! So she'd be sure she had seen me
on the trail behind her! And when she came out and saw my horse limpi