CHAPTER VI

September’s glory of gold and red and purple began to fade with the autumnal equinox.  It rained enough to soak the frost-bitten leaves, and then the mountain winds sent them flying and fluttering and scurrying to carpet the dells and spot the pools in the brooks and color the trails.  When the weather cleared and the sun rose bright again many of the aspen thickets were leafless and bare, and the willows showed stark against the gray sage hills, and the vines had lost their fire.  Hills and valleys had sobered with subtle change that left them none the less beautiful.

A mile or more down the road from White Slides, in a protected nook, nestled two cabins belonging to a cattleman named Andrews, who had formerly worked for Belllounds and had recently gone into the stock business for himself.  He had a rather young wife, and several children, and a brother who rode for him.  These people were the only neighbors of Belllounds for some ten miles on the road toward Kremmling.

Columbine liked Mrs. Andrews and often rode or walked down there for a little visit and a chat with her friend and a romp with the children.

Toward the end of September Columbine found herself combating a strong desire to go down to the Andrews ranch and try to learn some news about Wilson Moore.  If anything had been heard at White Slides it certainly had not been told her.  Jack Belllounds had ridden to Kremmling and back in one day, but Columbine would have endured much before asking him for information.

She did, however, inquire of the freighter who hauled Belllounds’s supplies, and the answer she got was awkwardly evasive.  That nettled Columbine.  Also it raised a suspicion which she strove to subdue.  Finally it seemed apparent that Wilson Moore’s name was not to be mentioned to her.

First, in her growing resentment, she had an impulse to go to her new friend, the hunter Wade, and confide in him not only her longing to learn about Wilson, but also other matters that were growing daily more burdensome.  How strange for her to feel that in some way Jack Belllounds had come between her and the old man she loved and called father!  Columbine had not divined that until lately.  She felt it now in the fact that she no longer sought the rancher as she used to, and he had apparently avoided her.  But then, Columbine reflected, she might be entirely wrong, for when Belllounds did meet her at meal-times, or anywhere, he seemed just as affectionate as of old.  Still he was not the same man.  A chill, an atmosphere of shadow, had pervaded the once wholesome ranch.  And so, feeling not yet well enough acquainted with Wade to confide so intimately in him, she stifled her impulses and resolved to make some effort herself to find out what she wanted to know.

As luck would have it, when she started out to walk down to the Andrews ranch she encountered Jack Belllounds.