e Cedar
Ranch."

Grant was on his feet in a moment, and nodded to Breckenridge, who rose
almost as quickly and glanced at him as he moved towards the door.

"Yes," he said, "there's some tough hoeing to be done now. You'll drive
Miss Muller back to Harper's, and then turn out the boys. They're to come
on to Cedar as fast as they can."

"And you?" said Breckenridge quietly.

"I'm going there now."

"You know the cattle-men would do almost anything to get their hands on
you."

"Oh, yes," Grant said wearily. "Aren't you wasting time?"

Breckenridge was outside the next moment, but before he had the sleigh
ready Grant lead a saddled horse out of the stable, and vanished at a
gallop down the beaten trail. It rang dully beneath the hoofs, but the
frost that had turned its surface dusty lessened the chance of stumbling,
and it was not until the first league had been left behind and he turned
at the forking beneath a big birch bluff that he tightened his grip on the
bridle. There it was different, for the trail no longer led wide and
trampled hard across the level prairie, but wound, an almost invisible
riband, through tortuous hollow and over swelling rise, so narrow that in
places the hoofs broke with a sharp crackling through the frozen crust of
snow. That, Larry knew, might, by crippling the beast he rode, stop him
then and there, and he pushed on warily, dazzled at times by the light of
the sinking moon which the glistening white plain flung back into his
eyes.

It was bitter cold, and utterly still for the birds had gone south long
ago, and there was no beast that ventured from his lair to face the frost
that night. Dulled as the trample of hoofs was, it rang about him
stridently, and now and then he could hear it roll repeated along the
slope of a rise. The hand upon the bridle had lost all sense of feeling,
his moccasined feet tingled painfully, and a white fringe crackled under
his hand when, warned by the nipping of his ears, he drew the big fur cap
down further over them. It is not difficult to lose the use of one's
members for life by incautiously exposing them to the cold of the prairie,
while a frost that may be borne by the man covered to the chin with great
sleigh robes, is not infrequently insupportable to the one on horseback.

Grant, however, took precautions, as it were mechanically, for his mind
was too busy to feel in its full keenness the sting of the frost, and
while his eyes were fixed on the