lieved over at Kerr's that they had him
pretty well on the line.

But Kerr had figured too surely on having his neighbor's cattle to show
the banker to stake all on the chance of Grace being able to wheedle him
into the scheme. If he couldn't get them by seduction, he meant to take
them in a raid. Grace never intended to come to meet him in the morning
alone.

One crime more would amount to little in addition to what Kerr had done
already, and it would be a trick on which he would pride himself and
laugh over all the rest of his life. It seemed certain now that Grace's
friendliness all along had been laid on a false pretense, with the one
intention of beguiling him to his disgrace, his destruction, if disgrace
could not be accomplished without it.

As he rode Whetstone--now quite recovered from his scorching, save for
the hair of his once fine tail--beside the sheriff, Lambert had some
uneasy cogitations on his sentimental blindness of the past; on the
good, honest advice that Vesta Philbrook had given him. Blood was blood,
after all. If the source of it was base, it was too much to hope that a
little removal, a little dilution, would ennoble it. She had lived there
all her life the associate of thieves and rascals; her way of looking
on men and property must naturally be that of the depredator, the
pillager, and thief.

"And yet," thought he, thumb in the pocket of his hairy vest where the
little handkerchief lay, "and yet----"

CHAPTER XXII

THE WILL-O'-THE-WISP

The Kerr ranch buildings were more than a mile away from the point where
Lambert and the sheriff halted to look down on them. The ranchhouse was
a structure of logs from which the bark had been stripped, and which had
weathered white as bones. It was long and low, suggesting spaciousness
and comfort, and enclosed about by a white picket fence.

A winding trace of trees and brushwood marked the course of the stream
that ran behind it. On the brink of this little water, where it flashed
free of the tangled willows, there was a corral and stables, but no sign
of either animal or human life about the place.

"He may be out with the cattle," Lambert suggested.

"We'll wait for him to come back, if he is. He's sure to be home between
now and tomorrow."

So that was her home, that was the roof that had sheltered her while she
grew in her loveliness. The soft call of his romance came whispering to
him again. Surely there was no attainder of bloo