al name at once."

The doctor smiled at the thought, then he frowned at the cold wind and the
shifting snows above the trail.

"You are a fool--a stack of fools, Dr. Horace Carey, to beat out of town
miles on miles on a fool's errand over a lost trail, trusting your
instinct that never lost you a direction yet, and all because of an inward
call to an unrevealed duty. Some other day will do as well. And here's
where I may as well cut off these notions of being led by inside signals.
What should make me sight danger in a man I never saw before, and who will
probably go out on the stage tomorrow morning? Oh, well, the Lord made us
as we are. He knows why."

He wheeled the pony about and began to trot toward Carey's Crossing.
Suddenly he halted.

"Let me see. I'm not twenty miles along, though I've come at a good rate.
I believe I'll cut across northwest and hit some of the settlers up on Big
Wolf Creek for the night. Lucky I've no wife to worry about me."

A wave of sadness swept over the man's face--just a sweep of sorrow that
left no mark. He turned abruptly from the trail and struck in a definite
direction across the snow-covered prairie. Presently his path veered to
the north, then to northwest.

"I know an ugly little creek running into Big Wolf that's the dickens to
cross. I'll run clear round it, even if it takes longer. After all, I'm
doing just what I said I wouldn't do. I don't know why I didn't go on, nor
why I am tacking off up here. Something tells me to do it, and I'll do
it."

But however changeable of mind he seemed to himself, Dr. Carey was a man
who formed his judgments so quickly and acted upon them so promptly that
he seemed most stable to other men. He rode forward now to a land wave
that dropped on one side to a creek, a quarter of a mile away, where black
shrubbery marked the water line. A long swell of wind swung down the
valley, whirling the snow in eddies before it. As the doctor's eye
followed them, he suddenly noted a red scarf lift above the tallest clumps
of bushes and flutter out to its full length, then drop again as the wind
swell passed.

"There's nobody in fifteen miles of here. I reckon that scarf blew there
and caught some time this fall when somebody was going out on the trail.
Mighty human looking thing, though. It seemed waving a signal to me. But I
must hurry on."

He hastened at a gallop up the ridge away from the creek, his mind still
on that red scarf flung about by th