, a yellow rind, haloed in
mist, was thrust above the level of the prairie. As Dallas greeted it,
the distant ridge of a snow-drift, rose-tinged like the sky, hid the
crawling speck that was the pung.

* * * * *

On his arrival behind David Bond, Nick Matthews had found that full
pockets were plentiful among the soldiery, and had promptly gone about
emptying them. Soon after entering The Trooper's Delight, he sat down to
a chip-piled table. His quarry surrounded him. And there he stayed
throughout the long night, wide-awake, sharp-witted, unwearied, adding
to his heap of coloured discs honestly and otherwise. Not until
reveille, a clarion warning, sent his fellow-players scurrying back
across the river, did he put his cards one side and throw himself down.
For, though a confirmed night-hawk, he needed a short nap to prepare for
some business that lay before him.

"Babe," a direct contrast to his brother, being thick-necked, stumpy and
dark, had not failed to garner his share of the rich harvest. From his
station behind the long counter, which was made of four heavy planks
supported on barrels at either end, he had poured strange mixtures into
beer mugs and exchanged them for good government coin. When he was not
performing his part as bartender, he was scraping illy timed tunes upon
a fiddle.

It was he who was left in charge when, shortly after noon, his brother
awoke, swallowed some whisky and armed himself with a brace of pistols.
Then, with no word to the few loungers in the saloon, the latter set
out, following the road that led up the river to the ferry-landing. At
the cut, he climbed the bank at a leisurely pace and continued his way
eastward, making straight across the snow toward the squat shack of the
Lancasters.

His approach was instantly marked. Marylyn was once more at her post,
studying the square of landscape framed by a window. When he made a
quick figure on that landscape, she saw him, and called to Dallas.

"Here's someone coming," she announced, inwardly glad at the possibility
of diversion.

Dallas hurriedly joined her. "Who can it be?" she asked.

The door was unbolted, the other window not fastened. Yet so far were
her thoughts from molestation that she left them so.

"Going to ask him in?" questioned Marylyn.

"Not till I find out who he is."

They fell silent, conjecturing.

When Matthews reached the drift before the shack, he halted and
signalled f