“I have an empty feeling,” he remarked to Carrigan.

“One always has a ‘let-down’ after a hard job,” was Pat’s sage rejoinder.  “You’ll feel restless for maybe a week now.”

They went from the spot up the snowy road and turned in at Pat’s shack for a smoke.  Late as it was, neither felt the need of sleep as yet.

“Well, it’s a comfort to know that we don’t have to plug again at that ground in the morning,” Lee remarked, with a sigh of satisfaction.  He had his feet on the table, his body relaxed, and his pipe going.

“Yeah.  The only disappointment I have,” Pat said, “is not having lifted the bonds and stocks out of Gretzinger.  If we hadn’t been so pressed for time, we might have played him a little till he took the hook.  I don’t like his kind at all.”

Bryant laughed.

“Why, he’s the best friend I have,” he exclaimed.  “What do you think he did for me?”

“Well, what?  Besides trying to shake you down?”

“Pat, he carried off and married my girl.”

The contractor lowered his feet, placed his hands upon his knees, and gazed at Bryant, with brows down-drawn and under lip up-thrust.

“That good-for-nothing Ruth what’s-her-name?” he demanded.  In all the months of their association it was the first time he had ever spoken of her to Bryant.

“Ruth Gardner, yes.”

Carrigan rose, gave Lee a long and solemn look, then went to a trunk in the corner of the room.  This he unlocked and opened.  From its interior he produced a black bottle.

“I don’t take a drink very often,” he announced, coming forward and setting the bottle on the table, “but this is one of the times.  We’ll take one to celebrate your luck.”

CHAPTER XXXII

About the middle of the next afternoon Lee Bryant was riding southward from camp on the main mesa trail.  The road was difficult and his horse Dick made slow time along the snowy path broken by wagons through the drifts, but the rider let the animal choose his own gait, as he had done that hot July day when coming up from the south to buy the Perro Creek ranch.  On reaching the ford Lee pulled rein.  How different now the creek from on that burning afternoon of his encounter with Ruth Gardner and Imogene Martin!  Snow covered its bed; the sands where he had knelt, the little pool, the foot-prints, lay hidden from sight.  How much had happened since!  And how different was his life!  He had suffered much and learned much since that hour of meeting; and he should never henceforth view this spot without a little feeling of melancholy.  The youth and two girls who drank there at the rill were no more:  they had become other persons.