eft front
shoe track familiar to him. He examined the clearest imprints very
carefully. If they had not been put there by Wilson Moore's white
mustang, Spottie, then they had been made by a horse with a strangely
similar hoof and shoe. Spottie had a hoof malformed, somewhat in the
shape of a triangle, and the iron shoe to fit it always had to be bent,
so that the curve was sharp and the ends closer together than those of
his other shoes.

Wade rode down to White Slides that day, and at the evening meal he
casually asked Moore if he had been riding Spottie of late.

"Sure. What other horse could I ride? Do you think I'm up to trying one
of those broncs?" asked Moore, in derision.

"Reckon you haven't been leavin' any tracks up Buffalo Park way?"

The cowboy slammed down his knife. "Say, Wade, are you growing dotty?
Good Lord! if I'd ridden that far--if I was able to do it--wouldn't you
hear me yell?"

"Reckon so, come to think of it. I just saw a track like Spottie's, made
two days ago."

"Well, it wasn't his, you can gamble on that," returned the cowboy.

* * * * *

Wade spent four days hiding in an aspen grove, on top of one of the
highest foothills above White Slides Ranch. There he lay at ease, like
an Indian, calm and somber, watching the trails below, waiting for what
he knew was to come.

On the fifth morning he was at his post at sunrise. A casual remark of
one of the new cowboys the night before accounted for the early hour of
Wade's reconnoiter. The dawn was fresh and cool, with sweet odor of sage
on the air; the jays were squalling their annoyance at this early
disturber of their grove; the east was rosy above the black range and
soon glowed with gold and then changed to fire. The sun had risen. All
the mountain world of black range and gray hill and green valley, with
its shining stream, was transformed as if by magic color. Wade sat down
with his back to an aspen-tree, his gaze down upon the ranch-house and
the corrals. A lazy column of blue smoke curled up toward the sky, to be
lost there. The burros were braying, the calves were bawling, the colts
were whistling. One of the hounds bayed full and clear.

The scene was pastoral and beautiful. Wade saw it clearly and whole.
Peace and plenty, a happy rancher's home, the joy of the dawn and the
birth of summer, the rewards of toil--all seemed significant there. But
Wade pondered on how pregnant with life that scene was