The scene was pastoral and beautiful.  Wade saw it clearly and whole.  Peace and plenty, a happy rancher’s home, the joy of the dawn and the birth of summer, the rewards of toil—­all seemed significant there.  But Wade pondered on how pregnant with life that scene was—­nature in its simplicity and freedom and hidden cruelty, and the existence of people, blindly hating, loving, sacrificing, mostly serving some noble aim, and yet with baseness among them, the lees with the wine, evil intermixed with good.

By and by the cowboys appeared on their spring mustangs, and in twos and threes they rode off in different directions.  But none rode Wade’s way.  The sun rose higher, and there was warmth in the air.  Bees began to hum by Wade, and fluttering moths winged uncertain flight over him.

At the end of another hour Jack Belllounds came out of the house, gazed around him, and then stalked to the barn where he kept his horses.  For a little while he was not in sight; then he reappeared, mounted on a white horse, and he rode into the pasture, and across that to the hay-field, and along the edge of this to the slope of the hill.  Here he climbed to a small clump of aspens.  This grove was not so far from Wilson Moore’s cabin; in fact, it marked the boundary-line between the rancher’s range and the acres that Moore had acquired.  Jack vanished from sight here, but not before Wade had made sure he was dismounting.

“Reckon he kept to that grassy ground for a reason of his own—­and plainer to me than any tracks,” soliloquized Wade, as he strained his eyes.  At length Belllounds came out of the grove, and led his horse round to where Wade knew there was a trail leading to and from Moore’s cabin.  At this point Jack mounted and rode west.  Contrary to his usual custom, which was to ride hard and fast, he trotted the white horse as a cowboy might have done when going out on a day’s work.  Wade had to change his position to watch Belllounds, and his somber gaze followed him across the hill, down the slope, along the willow-bordered brook, and so on to the opposite side of the great valley, where Jack began to climb in the direction of Buffalo Park.

After Belllounds had disappeared and had been gone for an hour, Wade went down on the other side of the hill, found his horse where he had left him, in a thicket, and, mounting, he rode around to strike the trail upon which Belllounds had ridden.  The imprint of fresh horse tracks showed clear in the soft dust.  And the left front track had been made by a shoe crudely triangular in shape, identical with that peculiar to Wilson Moore’s horse.

“Ahuh!” muttered Wade, in greeting to what he had expected to see.  “Well, Buster Jack, it’s a plain trail now—­damn your crooked soul!”