“I was tired and resting, How,” she had explained penitently, and gone about the task of preparing supper; but the man was not deceived, and that moment, if not before, he recognised the inevitable.

Yet even then he made no comment, nor altered in the minutest detail his manner.  If ever a human being played the game, it was How Landor.  With a blindness that was masterly, that was all but fatuous, he ignored the obvious.  His equanimity and patience were invulnerable.  Silent by nature, he grew fairly loquacious in an effort to be companionable.  Probably no white man alive would have done as he did, would have borne what he did; perhaps it would have been better had he done differently; but he was as he was.  Day after day he endured the galling starched linen and unaccustomed clothing, making long journeys to the distant town to keep his wardrobe clean and replenished.  Day after day he polished his boots and struggled with his cravat.  Puerile unqualifiedly an observer would have characterised this repeated farce; but to one who knew the tale in its entirety, it would have seemed very far from humorous.  All but sacrilege, it is to tell of this starved human’s doing at this time.  The sublime and the ridiculous ever elbow so closely in this life and jostled so continuously in those stormy hours of How Landor’s chastening.  Suffice it to repeat that every second through it all he played the game; played it with a smiling face, and the ghost of a jest ever trembling on his lips.  Played it from the moment he entered his house until the moment he daily disappeared, astride the vixenish undersized cayuse.  Then when he was alone, when there were no human eyes to observe, to pity perchance, then—­But let it pass what he did then.  It is another tale and extraneous.

Thus drifted by the late fall and early winter.  Bit by bit the days grew shorter; and then as a pendulum vibrates, lengthened shade by shade.  No human being came their way, nor wild thing, save roving murderers on pillage bent.  Even the cowmen he employed, the old hands he and Bess had both known for years, avoided him obviously, stubbornly.  After the execution of the will he had built them another ranch house at a distance on the range, and there they congregated and clung.  They accepted his money and obeyed his orders unquestioningly; but further than that—­they were white and he was red.  Howard, the one man with whom he had been friendly, had grown restless and drifted on—­whither no one knew.  Save for the Irish overseer and one other cowboy, the old Buffalo Butte ranch was deserted.  Locally, there neither was nor had been any outward manifestation of hostility, nor even gossip.  But the olden times when the hospitable ranch house of Colonel William Landor was the meeting point of ranchers within a radius of fifty miles were gone.  They did not persecute the new master or his white wife; they did a subtler, crueller thing:  they ignored them.  To the Indian’s face, when by infrequent chance they met, they were affable, obliging.  His reputation had spread too far for them to appear otherwise; but, again, they were white and he was red—­and between them the chasm yawned.