ntel over the fireplace, the day after
Christmas. Frequently she felt its puffy softness and its crackly
crispness and wondered dully what Billy Louise had sent to Ward.

Billy Louise refrained from expecting any reply until after New Year's.
Then she began to look for a letter, and when the days passed and
brought her no word, her moods changed oftener than the weather.

Ward's literary efforts, along about that time, consisted of cutting
notches in the window-sill beside his bunk.

On the day when the stage-driver gave Billy Louise's letter to Phoebe,
Ward cut a deeper, wider notch, thinking that day was Christmas. Under
the notch he scratched a word with the point of his knife. It had four
letters, and it told eloquently of the state of mind he was in.

It was the day after that when Seabeck and one of his men rode up the
creek and out into the field where Ward's cattle grazed apathetically
on the little grass tufts that stuck up out of the snow. Ward was
reading, and so did not see them until he raised himself up to make a
cigarette and saw them going straight across the coulee by the line
fence to the farther hills. He opened the window and shouted after
them, but the wind was blowing keen from that direction, and they did
not hear him.

Seabeck had been studying brands and counting, and he was telling Floyd
Carson that everything was straight as a string.

"He must be out working this winter. I should think he'd stay home and
feed these calves. The cows are looking pretty thin. I guess he isn't
much of a stock hand; these nesters aren't, as a general thing, and if
it's as Junkins says, and he puts all he makes into this place, he's
likely hard up. Mighty nice little ranch he's got. Well, let's work
over the divide and back that way. I didn't think we'd find anything
here."

They turned and angled up the steep hillside, and Ward watched them
glumly. He thought he knew why they were prowling around the place,
but it seemed to him that they might have stretched their curiosity a
little farther and investigated the cabin. He did not know that the
snow of a week ago was banked over the doorstep with a sharp, crusty
combing at the top, to prove that the door had not been opened for some
time. Nor did he know that the two had ridden past the cabin on the
other side of the creek and had seen how deserted the place looked; had
ridden to the stable, noted there the unmistakable and permanent air of
emp