Jack Belllounds drank, but no one saw him drunk, and no one could tell where he got the liquor.  He rode hard and fast; he drove the cowboys one way while he went another; he had grown shifty, cunning, more intolerant than ever.  Some nights he rode to Kremmling, or said he had been there, when next day the cowboys found another spent and broken horse to turn out.  On other nights he coaxed and bullied them into playing poker.  They won more of his money than they cared to count.

Columbine confided to Wade, with mournful whisper, that Jack paid no attention to her whatever, and that the old rancher attributed this coldness, and Jack’s backsliding, to her irresponsiveness and her tardiness in setting the wedding-day that must be set.  To this Wade had whispered in reply, “Don’t ever forget what I said to you an’ Wils that day!”

So Wade upheld Columbine with his subtle dominance, and watched over her, as it were, from afar.  No longer was he welcome in the big living-room.  Belllounds reacted to his son’s influence.

Twice in the early mornings Wade had surprised Jack Belllounds in the blacksmith shop.  The meetings were accidental, yet Wade ever remembered how coincidence beckoned him thither and how circumstance magnified strange reflections.  There was no reason why Jack should not be tinkering in the blacksmith shop early of a morning.  But Wade followed an uncanny guidance.  Like his hound Fox, he never split on trails.  When opportunity afforded he went into the shop and looked it over with eyes as keen as the nose of his dog.  And in the dust of the floor he had discovered little circles with dots in the middle, all uniform in size.  Sight of them did not shock him until they recalled vividly the little circles with dots in the earthen floor of Wilson Moore’s cabin.  Little marks made by the end of Moore’s crutch!  Wade grinned then like a wolf showing his fangs.  And the vitals of a wolf could no more strongly have felt the instinct to rend.

For Wade, the cloud on his horizon spread and darkened, gathered sinister shape of storm, harboring lightning and havoc.  It was the cloud in his mind, the foreshadowing of his soul, the prophetic sense of like to like.  Where he wandered there the blight fell!

* * * * *

Significant was the fact that Belllounds hired new men.  Bludsoe had quit.  Montana Jim grew surly these days and packed a gun.  Lem Billings had threatened to leave.  New and strange hands for Jack Belllounds to direct had a tendency to release a strain and tide things over.

Every time the old rancher saw Wade he rolled his eyes and wagged his head, as if combating superstition with an intelligent sense of justice.  Wade knew what troubled Belllounds, and it strengthened the gloomy mood that, like a poison lichen, seemed finding root.

Every day Wade visited his friend Wilson Moore, and most of their conversation centered round that which had become a ruling passion for both.  But the time came when Wade deviated from his gentleness of speech and leisure of action.