Pronto shot up his ears and checked his trot.

“What is it, boy?” called Columbine.  The trail was getting dark.  Shadows were creeping up the slope as she rode down to meet them.  The mustang had keen sight and scent.  She reined him to a halt.

All was silent.  The valley had begun to shade on the far side and the rose and gold seemed fading from the nearer.  Below, on the level floor of the valley, lay the rambling old ranch-house, with the cabins nestling around, and the corrals leading out to the soft hay-fields, misty and gray in the twilight.  A single light gleamed.  It was like a beacon.

The air was cold with a nip of frost.  From far on the other side of the ridge she had descended came the bawls of the last straggling cattle of the round-up.  But surely Pronto had not shot up his ears for them.  As if in answer a wild sound pealed down the slope, making the mustang jump.  Columbine had heard it before.

“Pronto, it’s only a wolf,” she soothed him.

The peal was loud, rather harsh at first, then softened to a mourn, wild, lonely, haunting.  A pack of coyotes barked in angry answer, a sharp, staccato, yelping chorus, the more piercing notes biting on the cold night air.  These mountain mourns and yelps were music to Columbine.  She rode on down the trail in the gathering darkness, less afraid of the night and its wild denizens than of what awaited her at White Slides Ranch.

CHAPTER II

Darkness settled down like a black mantle over the valley.  Columbine rather hoped to find Wilson waiting to take care of her horse, as used to be his habit, but she was disappointed.  No light showed from the cabin in which the cowboys lived; he had not yet come in from the round-up.  She unsaddled, and turned Pronto loose in the pasture.

The windows of the long, low ranch-house were bright squares in the blackness, sending cheerful rays afar.  Columbine wondered in trepidation if Jack Belllounds had come home.  It required effort of will to approach the house.  Yet since she must meet him, the sooner the ordeal was over the better.  Nevertheless she tiptoed past the bright windows, and went all the length of the long porch, and turned around and went back, and then hesitated, fighting a slow drag of her spirit, an oppression upon her heart.  The door was crude and heavy.  It opened hard.

Columbine entered a big room lighted by a lamp on the upper table and by blazing logs in a huge stone fireplace.  This was the living-room, rather gloomy in the corners, and bare, but comfortable, for all simple needs.  The logs were new and the chinks between them filled with clay, still white, showing that the house was of recent build.

The rancher, Belllounds, sat in his easy-chair before the fire, his big, horny hands extended to the warmth.  He was in his shirt-sleeves, a gray, bold-faced man, of over sixty years, still muscular and rugged.