r Bismarck. What was it that had suddenly made him see the necessity
of attending to the claim? Along with this came self-arraignment: After
all, he should have told Lancaster that a man who claimed the
quarter-section on the peninsula had been called from Dodge City.
Lounsbury had been certain that Matthews could not reach Fort Brannon
before the spring. But it had never occurred to him that the
section-boss would leave his girls alone! Now, he vowed that if any harm
befell Dallas and Marylyn, he had only himself to blame.

He buckled on his pistol-belt and padlocked the door. "I don't care
whether the old man likes it or not," he declared aloud, "I'm going down
there."

As he swung through the camp on his way to the corral, he saw one of Old
Michael's helpers coming toward him, picking his steps in the slush. The
man motioned, and held out a white something. It was an envelope, grimy
and unaddressed.

Lounsbury ripped it open and pulled out a written sheet.

"der mr lunsbery [ran the note] mathuse com las nite in a
quere outfit with a krazy preecher the preecher i think is
at the landcasters but the other sunuvagun is her i hav a i
on him prity kold wether river sollid."

It was partly through the generous employment of his imagination that
the storekeeper was able to make out the scrawl, which, though not
signed, he knew to be the pilot's. That same imagination enabled him to
bring up numberless disturbing--almost terrible--pictures.

The astonished helper gazed after him as he went tearing away in the
direction of the horse-herd. "By jingo!" he grumbled; "twenty miles--and
he didn't even say treat!"

Soon Lounsbury's favorite saddler, urged on by a quirt, was kicking up a
path across the crusted drifts that Shadrach had so recently surmounted.
As the storekeeper cantered swiftly forward, a new question presented
itself to him: Was the "preacher" in league with Matthews, and so was
carrying the section-boss out of the way? He decided negatively. He had
given only a glance to Lancaster's companion, but that, together with
the passing glimpse from the store, had shown him a venerable man whose
piercing eyes held a pious light. He was no scoundrel confederate. He
was plainly but a brave, perhaps a fanatic and foolhardy, apostle in the
wilderness, and his calling had kept Matthews from confiding in him.

While Lounsbury thus alternately tortured and eased his mind, he had
passed the sombr