e. When darkness
overtook him he dismounted, unsaddled, and groped about for firewood.
Despite its recent soaking the resinous bull pine flared up at the
touch of a match, and with his back to a rock-wall, the cowboy sat and
watched the little flames shoot upward. Once more he felt for his
"makings" and with infinite pains dried out his papers and tobacco.

"It's the chance I be'n aimin' to make for myself," he mused, as he
drew the grey smoke of a cigarette deep into his lungs, "to get Bat an'
the pilgrim away--an' I ride off and leave it." The cigarette was
consumed and he rolled another. "Takin' a slant at himself from the
inside, a man kind of gets a line on how damned ornery folks can get.
Purdy got shot, an' everyone said he got just what was comin' to
him---- Me, an' everyone else--an' he did. But when you get down to
cases, he wasn't no hell of a lot worse'n me, at that. We was both
after the same thing--only his work was coarser." For hours the man
sat staring into his fire, the while he rolled and smoked many
cigarettes.

"Oh, hell!" he exclaimed, aloud. "I can't turn nester, an' even if I
did, she couldn't live out in no mud-roof shack in the bottom of some
coulee! Still, she---- There I go again, over the same old trail.
This here little girl has sure gone to my head--like a couple of jolts
of hundred-proof on an empty stummick. Anyhow, she's a damn sight
safer'n ever she was before, an'--I'll bet the old man _would_ let me
take that Eagle Creek ranch off his hands, an' stake me to a little
bunch of stock besides, if I went at him right. If it wasn't for that
damn pilgrim! Bat was right. He holds the edge on me--but he's a
man." The cowboy glanced anxiously toward the east where the sky was
beginning to lighten with the first hint of dawn. He rose, trampled
out his fire, and threw the saddle onto his horse. "I've got to find
him," he muttered, "if Bat ain't found him already. I don't know much
about this swimmin' business but if he could have got holt of a tree or
somethin' he might have made her through."

Now riding, now dismounting to lead his horse over some particularly
rough outcropping of rocks, or through an almost impenetrable tangle of
scrub, the man made his way over the divide and came down into the
valley amid a shower of loose rock and gravel, at a point some distance
below the lower end of the canyon.

The mountains were behind him. Only an occasional butte reared its