The man looked about nervously.  He was rather alarmed at the interest he had excited.  The next moment Peter Hamilton had walked into the room.  There was something crucial in his entrance at this particular time; it crystallized suspicion.  The gossip took advantage of the greetings to Hamilton to make his escape.  Texas Tyler left the bunk-room immediately and looked for him in the room with the dancers.  The fiddles, in the hands of a couple of Mexicans, had set the whole room whirling as if by magic.  As they danced they sang, joining with the “caller-out,” who held his vociferous post between the rooms, till the room was full of singing, dancing men and women, who spun and pirouetted as if they had not a care in the world.  But Texas Tyler was not of these, as he looked through the dancers for his man.  There was a red flash in the pupils of his eyes, and he told himself that he was going to do things the way they did them in Texas, for, of course, he knew that the loose-lipped idiot had meant Judith Rodney and Peter Hamilton.  Never before had such an idea occurred to him, and now that it had been presented to his mind’s eye, he wondered why he had been such a blind fool.  Never had the singing to these dances seemed so absurd.

    “Hawk hop out and the crow hop in,
    Three hands round and go it ag’in. 
    Allemane left, back to the missus,
    Grande right and left and sneak a few kisses.”

He rushed from the room and down to the stable.  At sight of him some one leaped on a horse and rode out into the darkness.

“Who was that?” asked Texas of a man lounging by the corral.

“That was—­” and he gave the name of the loose-lipped man.

Texas cursed long and picturesquely.  Then he went back to the bunk-room and tried to pick a quarrel with Peter Hamilton, who good-naturedly assumed that his old friend had been drinking and refused to take offence.

Peter went in to ask Kitty to dance with him.  All that evening he had been waiting anxiously for Judith.  Meanwhile he had used all his influence as a newly appointed member of the Wetmore outfit to soothe the ruffled feelings of the cattle-men.  Of the tragedy in the valley he had heard no rumor.

Kitty had come to the point where she was willing to waive the Recamier-Chateaubriand friendship in favor of one more personal and ordinary.  In fact, as Peter showed a disposition to regard as final her answer to him on the day he had spurred across the desert, Kitty, with true feminine perversity, inclined to permit him to resume his suit.  His acquiescence in her refusal she had at first regarded as the turning of the worm; after the wolf-hunt, however, her meditations were more disturbing.  She had never told Peter of that strange woodland meeting with Judith, yet Judith’s beauty, her probable hold over Peter, the degree of his affection for her were rankling questions in Kitty’s consciousness.  In the stress of these considerations Kitty lost her head completely for so old a campaigner.  She drew the apron-string tight—­attempted force instead of strategy.