ng
she knew I had lied to her!"

But why? Why? What lay back of all this?

In the end he put out the light, slipped the spur rowel into his vest
pocket, and went out to his horse. Then when an hour's search brought
him no nearer to the hidden truth for which he was groping, he gave up
trying to pick up this other man's trail in the rocky soil about
Harte's place and turned back toward the south-east and his own ranch.

"I'm going to have a talk with you, Miss Grey Eyes," he said softly.
"I've got to give you back your spur, and I'm going to ask you some
questions."

He rode late into the night, stopped for a few hours under the stars
with saddle blanket for bed, and in the dawn pushed on again.

For the few days which followed he had, in the stress of range work,
little time for thought of the riddle which had been set for him to
solve, and when he had time after the day's work he was tired and ready
for sleep. He was working short handed now for the very simple and not
uncommon reason that he was spending no dollar which he did not have to
spend. The payments he had already made to Pollard had been heavy for
him, and there was yet another five thousand dollars to be forthcoming
in six months. The contract was clear upon the point, and he knew that
if he failed to meet his obligation Henry Pollard would be vastly
pleased, being in a position to keep the fifteen thousand which had been
paid to him and to get his range back to boot.

Perhaps because Henry Pollard had never lived upon the ranch during the
twenty years he had owned it improvements were few and poor. There was
the barn, too small now, which must come down in another year; there was
the old corral which was little used since Thornton had had the newer,
bigger one builded. Then, for ranch house, there was a single room
cabin, its walls of heavy logs from the hills at the head of the Big
Little River, its door of great thick planks rough and nail studded, its
roof of shakes. A hundred yards from it, at the foot of the knoll upon
which the ranch house stood, was a similar cabin, a dozen feet longer,
serving as the men's bunk house.

Big Little River wound about the foot of the knoll, separating
Thornton's cabin from the bunk house, three or four feet deep here and
spanned by a crude footbridge. In its windings it made a sort of
horseshoe about the knoll so that looking out from the door of the
cattle man's cabin one saw the sluggish water to east, west a