Buck Thornton had returned to the Poison Hole ranch.  But first he had ridden from the Smith place down the trail to Harte’s, where he made swift, careful search for some sign to tell him who was the man who had lamed his horse maliciously and seemingly with no purpose to be gained.  Further, he had sought for tracks to tell him from where this man had come, where he had gone.  When he had found nothing he went, he hardly knew why, to the cabin, pushed the door open and entered.  And instead of learning anything definitely now he was merely the more perplexed.  By the fireplace lay a chair, overturned.  There had been some sort of hurried movement here, perhaps a struggle.  The table had been pushed to one side, one leg catching in the rag rug and rumpling it.  He struck a match, lighted the lamp and sought for some explanation.  When had this struggle, if struggle there had been, occurred?  It must have been after he and Miss Waverly had set out on the trail to Smith’s, he told himself positively.  Then there had been two people here in the meantime, for it takes two people to make a tussel.  And they had gone.  Who could it be?  Was he after all to find a clue to the man who had maimed his horse?

Looking about him curiously it chanced that he found something that drove a puzzled frown into his eyes.  It had caught in the frayed edge of the rug, and to have been so caught and so left meant that it had been done during the struggle he had already pictured.  He took it up into his hand, trying to understand.  For it was the rowel of a spur, a tiny, sharp, shining rowel that had come loose from a spur he remembered very well.  And he remembered, too, that Winifred Waverly had had her spurs on when she came out to him at the barn!

“It happened while I was out after the horses!” He sat down, the shining spiked wheel lying in the palm of his hand, his brows drawn heavily.  “While I was out there ... it happened.  Some jasper came in here, there was some sort of a tussle ... and she didn’t say a damned word about it!”

Yes, he was certain now that something had happened during the brief time between his going out for the horses and the girl’s coming to him at the barn.  Something that had changed her, that had killed her friendliness toward him, that had made her cold and cruelly different.

“The same man who slipped his knife across my horse’s foot came in here and saw her while I was out for the horses,” he said slowly.  “The same man.  It must have been.  And she could tell me who it was and she didn’t.  Why?  After they had struggled here, too!  Why?”

He could see no reason in it all, no reason for her silence, no reason for a man’s malicious cruelty to a horse.  Nor were these the only things which he could not understand.  Groping for the truth, he began carefully to run over the things which had seemed strange to him and which now struck him as being connected in some plan darkly hidden.