were no smoke, no noise, no horses anywhere round the cabin, and after watching awhile Wade went forward to look at it.  It was an old ramshackle hunter’s or prospector’s cabin, with dirt floor, a crumbling fireplace and chimney, and a bed platform made of boughs.  Including the door, it had three apertures, and the two smaller ones, serving as windows, looked as if they had been intended for port-holes as well.  The inside of the cabin was large and unusually well lighted, owing to the windows and to the open chinks between the logs.  Wade saw a deck of cards lying bent and scattered in one corner, as if a violent hand had flung them against the wall.  Strange that Wade’s memory returned a vivid picture of Jack Belllounds in just that act of violence!  The only other thing around the place which earned scrutiny from Wade was a number of horseshoe tracks outside, with the left front shoe track familiar to him.  He examined the clearest imprints very carefully.  If they had not been put there by Wilson Moore’s white mustang, Spottie, then they had been made by a horse with a strangely similar hoof and shoe.  Spottie had a hoof malformed, somewhat in the shape of a triangle, and the iron shoe to fit it always had to be bent, so that the curve was sharp and the ends closer together than those of his other shoes.

Wade rode down to White Slides that day, and at the evening meal he casually asked Moore if he had been riding Spottie of late.

“Sure.  What other horse could I ride?  Do you think I’m up to trying one of those broncs?” asked Moore, in derision.

“Reckon you haven’t been leavin’ any tracks up Buffalo Park way?”

The cowboy slammed down his knife.  “Say, Wade, are you growing dotty?  Good Lord! if I’d ridden that far—­if I was able to do it—­wouldn’t you hear me yell?”

“Reckon so, come to think of it.  I just saw a track like Spottie’s, made two days ago.”

“Well, it wasn’t his, you can gamble on that,” returned the cowboy.

* * * * *

Wade spent four days hiding in an aspen grove, on top of one of the highest foothills above White Slides Ranch.  There he lay at ease, like an Indian, calm and somber, watching the trails below, waiting for what he knew was to come.

On the fifth morning he was at his post at sunrise.  A casual remark of one of the new cowboys the night before accounted for the early hour of Wade’s reconnoiter.  The dawn was fresh and cool, with sweet odor of sage on the air; the jays were squalling their annoyance at this early disturber of their grove; the east was rosy above the black range and soon glowed with gold and then changed to fire.  The sun had risen.  All the mountain world of black range and gray hill and green valley, with its shining stream, was transformed as if by magic color.  Wade sat down with his back to an aspen-tree, his gaze down upon the ranch-house and the corrals.  A lazy column of blue smoke curled up toward the sky, to be lost there.  The burros were braying, the calves were bawling, the colts were whistling.  One of the hounds bayed full and clear.