diggers up in the
mountains. Must have got lost from a wagon-train thet Indians set on
soon after--so the miners said. Anyway, Old Bill took the baby an'
raised her as his own."

"How old is she now?" queried Wade, with a singular change in his tone.

"Columbine's around nineteen."

Bent Wade lowered his head a little, hiding his features under the old,
battered, wide-brimmed hat. The amiable innkeeper did not see the tremor
that passed over him, nor the slight stiffening that followed, nor the
gray pallor of his face. She went on talking until some one called her.

Wade went outdoors, and with bent head walked down the street, across a
little river, out into green pasture-land. He struggled with an amazing
possibility. Columbine Belllounds might be his own daughter. His heart
leaped with joy. But the joy was short-lived. No such hope in this world
for Bent Wade! This coincidence, however, left him with a strange,
prophetic sense in his soul of a tragedy coming to White Slides Ranch.
Wade possessed some power of divination, some strange gift to pierce the
veil of the future. But he could not exercise this power at will; it
came involuntarily, like a messenger of trouble in the dark night.
Moreover, he had never yet been able to draw away from the fascination
of this knowledge. It lured him on. Always his decision had been to go
on, to meet this boding circumstance, or to remain and meet it, in the
hope that he might take some one's burden upon his shoulders. He sensed
it now, in the keen, poignant clairvoyance of the moment--the tangle of
life that he was about to enter. Old Bill Belllounds, big and fine,
victim of love for a wayward son; Buster Jack, the waster, the
tearer-down, the destroyer, the wild youth at a wild time; Columbine,
the girl of unknown birth, good and loyal, subject to a condition sure
to ruin her. Wade's strange mind revolved a hundred outcomes to this
conflict of characters, but not one of them was the one that was
written. That remained dark. Never had he received so strong a call out
of the unknown, nor had he ever felt such intense curiosity. Hope had
long been dead in him, except the one that he might atone in some way
for the wrong he had done his wife. So the pangs of emotion that
recurred, in spite of reason and bitterness, were not recognized by him
as lingering hopes. Wade denied the human in him, but he thrilled at the
thought of meeting Columbine Belllounds. There was something here b