to me to see."

He was tired and hungry, a huge moraine lay between, and the trail was
long and rough. "To catch them in the act is impossible. However," he
reflected, "they have but two trails along which to descend. One of these
passes my door, and the other, a very difficult trail, leads down the
South Fork. I'll have time to get breakfast and change horses. They'll
probably wait till night before attempting to go out, anyway."

In less than three hours he was over on the trail in the canon, quite
certain that the hunters were still above him. He rode quietly up the
valley, pausing often to listen and to scrutinize the landscape; but no
sign of camp-fire and no further rifle-shots came, and at last he went
into camp upon the trail, resolved to wait till the poachers appeared, a
ward which his experience as a soldier helped him to maintain without
nodding.

In these long hours his thought played about the remembrance of his last
visit to the Fork and his hour with Lee. He wondered what she was doing at
the moment. How charming she had looked there at Redfields'--so girlish in
form, so serious and womanly of face!

He felt as never before the ineludible loneliness of the ranger's life.
Here he sat in the midst of a mighty forest with many hostile minds all
about him, and it must be confessed he began to wonder whether his
services to the nation were worth so much hardship, such complete
isolation. The stream sang of the eternities, and his own short span of
life (half gone already without any permanent accomplishment) seemed
pitifully ephemeral. The guardians of these high places must forever be
solitary. No ranger could rightfully be husband and father, for to bring
women and children into these solitudes would be cruel.

He put all this aside--for the time--by remembering that he was a soldier
under orders, and that marriage was a long way off, and so smoked his pipe
and waited for the dawn, persistent as a Sioux, and as silent as a fox.

At daylight, there being still no sign of his quarry, he saddled his
horse, and was about to ride up the trail when he caught the sound of
voices and the sharp click of iron hoofs on the rocks above him. With his
horse's bridle on his arm he awaited the approaching horseman, resolute
and ready to act.

As the marauders rounded the elbow in the trail, he was surprised to
recognize in the leader young Gregg. The other man was a stranger, an
older man, with a grizzled beard, and