here, northwest of the Spirit.
There they tell me he lives all alone; but no one's seen him in a dog's
age."

* * * * *

Garth and Natalie avoided everything beyond the merest commonplaces to
each other until they were alone; and even after Tom Lillywhite, bidding
them farewell, had driven off, chirping to his horses, it was a long
time before either had the courage to make a move toward overcoming the
ghastly constraint his story had caused between them.

"Haven't we heard enough?" said Garth quietly at last. "Need you go any
further?"

Natalie in the interim had had time to pass her emotional crisis. She
was very pale, and her eyes were big; but she was now calmer than he. "I
have heard enough, surely," she said; "but after coming all this way it
would seem cowardly, wouldn't it, to be satisfied with hearsay
evidence?--and there is still my promise to his mother."

Her tone impressed Garth with the utter hopelessness of trying to
dissuade her. "But how can I let you expose yourself to--to what we may
find!" he groaned.

"I am not a child," said Natalie quietly. "And I shall not quail at the
mere sight of ugliness." She turned away from him. "Besides," she added
in a lower tone, "you know the worst now; and that was the hardest thing
to bear--your hearing it I mean. No," she went on, facing him again,
wistfully and valorously; "it promises to be _very_ ugly, but then I
undertook it, you see. I am going on."

They could not bear to meet each other's eyes; and miserably turning
their backs, affected to busy themselves with small tasks. Natalie,
quivering with the shame of the lash all unwittingly applied by old Tom,
longed with an inexpressible longing to have Garth with a hint or a look
assure her that he loved her, and so, thrusting the wretch Mabyn out of
their charmed circle, reinstate her in her self-respect. But poor Garth
in his clumsy, masculine delicacy thought that to obtrude himself at
such a moment would only hurt her more. He kept silent, and he averted
his eyes, and Natalie, misunderstanding, tasted the very dregs of
shame.

XIII

THE NEWLY-MARRIED PAIR

Out on the bosom of that infinite prairie, which rolls its unmeasured
miles north and west of the Spirit River, a last place of mystery and
dreams, still unharnessed by the geographers, and reluctantly written
down "unexplored" on their maps, two human figures were riding slowly,
with their horses' heads