d--Margaret--he loves you yet, as I sed. He is going under
the name of Jack Smith, the blacksmith here, an' he'll lead another
life--but he loves you yet," he whispered again.

Then he told her what had happened, knowing that Jack's secret would
be safe with her.

When he told her how they had buried little Jack, and of the father's
admission that his determination to lead the life of an outlaw had
come when he found that she had been untrue to him, she was shaken
with grief. She could only sit and weep. Not even at the gate, when
the old man left her, did she say anything.

Within, she stopped before a picture which hung over the mantle-piece
and looked at it, through eyes that filled again and again with
tears. It was the picture of a pretty mountain girl with dark eyes
and sensual lip.

Margaret knelt before it and wept.

The boy had come and stood moodily at the front gate. The hot and
resentful blood still tinged in his cheek. He looked at his
knuckles--they were cut and swollen where he had struck the boy who
had jeered him. It hurt him, but he only smiled grimly.

Never before had any one called him a wood's-colt. He had never heard
the word before, but he knew what it meant. For the first time in his
life, he hated his mother. He heard her weeping in the little room
they called home. He merely shut his lips tightly and, in spite of
the stoicism that was his by nature, the tears swelled up in his
eyes.

They were hot tears and he could not shake them off. For the first
time the wonder and the mystery of it all came over him. For the
first time he felt that he was not as other boys,--that there was a
meaning in this lonely cabin and the shunned woman he called mother,
and the glances, some of pity, some of contempt, which he had met all
of his life.

As he stood thinking this, Richard Travis rode slowly down the main
road leading from the town to The Gaffs. And this went through the
boy successively--not in words, scarcely--but in feelings:

"What a beautiful horse he is riding--it thrills me to see it--I love
it naturally--oh, but to own one!

"What a handsome man he is--and how like a gentleman he looks! I like
the way he sits his horse. I like that way he has of not noticing
people. He has got the same way about him I have got--that I've
always had--that I love--a way that shows me I'm not afraid, and that
I have got nerve and bravery.

"He sits that horse just as I would sit him--his head--his f