The gorgeous landscape was, for a moment, utterly lost upon her.  The snowy peaks of the Rockies, stretching far as the eye could see away to the north and south, like some giant fortification set up to defend the rolling pastures of the prairies from the ceaseless attack of the stormy Pacific Ocean, were far from her thoughts.  Her eyes, it is true, were resting on the level flat of the muskeg, beyond the grove of slender pines which lined the approach to the house, but she was not thinking of that.  No, recollection was struggling back through two years of a busy life, to a time when, for a brief space, she had watched over the welfare of another than her uncle, when the dark native blood which flowed plentifully in her veins had asserted itself, and a nature which was hers had refused to remain buried beneath a superficial European training.  She was thinking of a man who had formed a secret part of her life for a few short years, when she had allowed her heart to dictate a course for her actions which no other motive but that of love could have brought about.  She was thinking of Peter Retief, a pretty scoundrel, a renowned “bad man,” a man of wild and reckless daring.  He had been the terror of the countryside.  A cattle-thief who feared neither man nor devil; a man who for twelve months and more had carried, his life in his hands, the sworn enemy of law and order, but who, in his worst moments, had never been known to injure a poor man or a woman.  The wild blood of the half-breed that was in her had been stirred, as only a woman’s blood can be, by his reckless dealings, his courage, effrontery, and withal his wondrous kindliness of disposition.  She was thinking of this man now, this man whom she knew to be numbered amongst the countless victims of that dreadful mire.  And what had conjured this thought?  A horse—­a horse peacefully grazing far out across the mire in the direction of the distant hills which she knew had once been this desperado’s home.

Her train of recollection suddenly became broken, and a sigh escaped her as the sound of her uncle’s voice fell upon her ears.  She did not move, however, for she knew that Lablache was with him, and this man she hated with the fiery hatred only to be found in the half-breeds of any native race.

“I’m sorry, John, we can’t agree on the point,” Lablache was saying in his wheezy voice, as the two men stood at the other end of the veranda, “but I’m quite determined Upon the matter myself.  The land intersects mine and cuts me clean off from the railway siding, and I am forced to take my cattle a circle of nearly fifteen miles to ship them.  If he would only be reasonable and allow a passage I would say nothing.  I will force him to sell.”

“If you can,” put in the rancher.  “I reckon you’ve got chilled steel to deal with when you endeavor to ‘force’ old Joe Norton to sell the finest wheat land in the country.”