his injured foot.  Wade worried about that much more than Moore.  The thing that mostly occupied the cowboy was the near approach of October first, with its terrible possibility for him.  He did not talk about it, except when fever made him irrational, but it was plain to Wade how he prayed and hoped and waited in silence.  Strange how he trusted Wade to avert catastrophe of Columbine’s marriage!  Yet such trust seemed familiar to Wade, as he reflected over past years.  Had he not wanted such trust—­had he not invited it?

For twenty years no happiness had come to Wade in any sense comparable to that now secretly his, as he lived near Columbine Belllounds, divining more and more each day how truly she was his own flesh and the image of the girl he had loved and married and wronged.  Columbine was his daughter.  He saw himself in her.  And Columbine, from being strongly attracted to him and trusting in him and relying upon him, had come to love him.  That was the most beautiful and terrible fact of his life—­beautiful because it brought back the past, her babyhood, and his barren years, and gave him this sudden change, where he lived transported with the sense and the joy of his possession.  It was terrible because she was unhappy, because she was chained to duty and honor, because ruin faced her, and lastly because Wade began to have the vague, gloomy intimations of distant tragedy.  Far off, like a cloud on the horizon, but there!  Long ago he had learned the uselessness of fighting his morbid visitations.  But he clung to hope, to faith in life, to the victory of the virtuous, to the defeat of evil.  A thousand proofs had strengthened him in that clinging.

There were personal dread and poignant pain for Wade in Columbine Belllounds’s situation.  After all, he had only his subtle and intuitive assurance that matters would turn out well for her in the end.  To trust that now, when the shadow began to creep over his own daughter, seemed unwise—­a juggling with chance.

“I’m beginnin’ to feel that I couldn’t let her marry that Buster Jack,” soliloquized Wade, as he rode along the grassy trail.  “Fust off, seein’ how strong was her sense of duty an’ loyalty, I wasn’t so set against it.  But somethin’s growin’ in me.  Her love for that crippled boy, now, an’ his for her!  Lord! they’re so young an’ life must be so hot an’ love so sweet!  I reckon that’s why I couldn’t let her marry Jack....  But, on the other hand, there’s the old man’s faith in his son, an’ there’s Collie’s faith in herself an’ in life.  Now I believe in that.  An’ the years have proved to me there’s hope for the worst of men....  I haven’t even had a talk with this Buster Jack.  I don’t know him, except by hearsay.  An’ I’m sure prejudiced, which’s no wonder, considerin’ where I saw him in Denver....  I reckon, before I go any farther, I’d better meet this Belllounds boy an’ see what’s in him.”

* * * * *

It was characteristic of Wade that this soliloquy abruptly ended his thoughtful considerations for the time being.  This was owing to the fact that he rested upon a decision, and also because it was time he began to attend to the object of his climb.