e my wristband. There are eleven shots in
it, and I shoot fairly straight. Good-day!"

Before they had recovered from their astonishment he was gone.

He did not follow the road along which Joanne had come a short time before,
but turned again into the winding trail that led riverward through the
poplars. Where before he had been a little amused at himself, he was now
more seriously disgusted. He was not afraid of Quade, who was perhaps the
most dangerous man along the line of rail. Neither was he afraid of the
lawless men who worked his ends. But he knew that he had made powerful
enemies, and all because of an unknown woman whom he had never seen until
half an hour before. It was this that disturbed his equanimity--the _woman_
of it, and the knowledge that his interference had been unsolicited and
probably unnecessary. And now that he had gone this far he found it not
easy to recover his balance. Who was this Joanne Gray? he asked himself.
She was not ordinary--like the hundred other women who had gone on ahead of
her to Tete Jaune Cache. If she had been that, he would soon have been in
his little shack on the shore of the river, hard at work. He had planned
work for himself that afternoon, and he was nettled to discover that his
enthusiasm for the grand finale of a certain situation in his novel was
gone. Yet for this he did not blame her. He was the fool. Quade and his
friends would make him feel that sooner or later.

His trail led him to a partly dry muskeg bottom. Beyond this was a thicker
growth of timber, mostly spruce and cedar, from behind which came the
rushing sound of water. A few moments more and he stood with the wide
tumult of the Athabasca at his feet. He had chosen this spot for his little
cabin because the river ran wild here among the rocks, and because
pack-outfits going into the southward mountains could not disturb him by
fording at this point. Across the river rose the steep embankments that
shut in Buffalo Prairie, and still beyond that the mountains, thick with
timber rising billow on billow until trees looked like twigs, with gray
rock and glistening snow shouldering the clouds above the last purple line.
The cabin in which he had lived and worked for many weeks faced the river
and the distant Saw Tooth Range, and was partly hidden in a clump of
jack-pines. He opened the door and entered. Through the window to the south
and west he could see the white face of Mount Geikie, and forty miles away