off the chill of the night, he
could not wonder that the woman at the tent had fainted. Happy Jack
suspected shrewdly that he could, in that rig, startle almost any one.

He watched the coulee wistfully. They were making fires, down there
below him; great, revealing bonfires at intervals that would make it
impossible to pass their line unseen. He could not doubt that some one
was _cached_ in the shadows with a gun. There were more than two men;
Happy Jack thought that there must be at least four or five. He would
have liked to go down, just out of gun range, and shout explanations
and a request for some clothes--only for the women. Happy was always
ill at ease in the presence of strange women, and he felt, just now,
quite unequal to the ordeal of facing those two. He sat huddled in the
shadow of a rock and wished profanely that women would stay at home
and not go camping out in the Badlands, where their presence was
distinctly inappropriate and undesirable. If the men down there were
alone, he felt sure that he could make them understand. Seeing they
were not alone, however, he stayed where he was and watched the fires,
while his teeth chattered with cold and his stomach ached with the
hunger he could not appease.

Till daylight he sat there unhappily and watched the unwinking
challenge of the flames below, and miserably wished himself elsewhere;
even the jibes of the Happy Family would be endurable, so long as he
had the comfort afforded by the Flying U camp. But that was miles
away. And when daylight brought warmth and returning courage, he went
so far as to wish the Flying U camp farther away than it probably was.
He wanted to get somewhere, and ask help from strangers rather than
those he knew best.

With that idea fixed in his mind, he got stiffly to his bruised feet,
readjusted the sheepskin and began wearily to climb higher. When the
sun tinged all the hilltops golden yellow, he turned and shook his
fist impotently at the camp far beneath him. Then he went on doggedly.

Standing at last on a high peak, he looked away toward the sunrise and
made out a white speck on a grassy side-hill; beside it, a gray square
moved slowly over the green. Sheep, and a sheep camp--and Happy Jack,
hater of sheep though he was, hailed the sight as a bit of rare good
luck. His spirits rose immediately, and he started straight for the
place.

Down in the next coulee--there were always coulees to cross, no matter
in what directio