fooled at such critical
moments of life. Ben Wade once said that I could have reformed Jack were
it possible to love him. Now the truth of that came home to me, and
somehow it was overwhelming.

"Dad received this truth--and it was beyond me to realize what it meant
to him. He must have seen all his earlier hopes fulfilled, his pride
vindicated, his shame forgotten, his love rewarded. Yet he must have
seen all that, as would a man leaning with one foot over a bottomless
abyss. He looked transfigured, yet conscious of terrible peril. His
great heart seemed to leap to meet this last opportunity, with all
forgiveness, with all gratitude; but his will yielded with a final and
irrevocable resolve. A resolve dark and sinister!

"He raised his huge fists higher and higher, and all his body lifted and
strained, towering and trembling, while his face was that of a righteous
and angry god.

"'My son, I take your word!' he rolled out, his voice filling the room
and reverberating through the house. 'I give you Collie!... She will be
yours!... But, by the love I bore your mother--I swear--if you ever
steal again--I'll kill you!'

"I can't say any more--

"COLUMBINE."

CHAPTER XIV

Spring came early that year at White Slides Ranch. The snow melted off
the valleys, and the wild flowers peeped from the greening grass while
yet the mountain domes were white. The long stone slides were glistening
wet, and the brooks ran full-banked, noisy and turbulent and roily.

Soft and fresh of color the gray old sage slopes came out from under
their winter mantle; the bleached tufts of grass waved in the wind and
showed tiny blades of green at the roots; the aspens and oaks, and the
vines on fences and cliffs, and the round-clumped, brook-bordering
willows took on a hue of spring.

The mustangs and colts in the pastures snorted and ran and kicked and
cavorted; and on the hillsides the cows began to climb higher, searching
for the tender greens, bawling for the new-born calves. Eagles shrieked
the release of the snow-bound peaks, and the elks bugled their piercing
calls. The grouse-cocks spread their gorgeous brown plumage in parade
before their twittering mates, and the jays screeched in the woods, and
the sage-hens sailed along the bosom of the gray slopes.

Black bears, and browns, and grizzlies came out of their winter's sleep,
and left huge, muddy tracks on the trails; the timber wolves at dusk
mourned their hungry calls fo