ilderness at breakneck speed to see
a girl at Wetmore's. But her lack of comment caused no ripple of surprise
in the flow of loose-lipped speculation that served, for the time being,
to inject a casual interest into the talk of these folk, bored to the
verge of demoralization by long waiting for Chugg.

Judith preferred to confirm her apprehensions regarding Hamilton's ride,
alone. She knew--had not all her woman's intuitions risen in clamorous
warning--and yet she hoped, hoped despairingly, even though the dread
alternative to the girl at the Wetmore ranch threatened lynch law for her
brother. Her very gait changed as she withdrew from the group about the
door, covertly gaining her vantage-ground inch by inch. The heels of her
riding-boots made no sound as she stole across the kitchen floor, toeing
in like an Indian tracking an enemy through the forest. The small window
at the back of the kitchen commanded a view of the road in all its
sprawling circumlocution. Seen from this prospect, it had no more design
than the idle scrawlings of a child on a bit of paper; but the choice of
roads to Good and Evil was not fraught with more momentous consequences
than was each prong of that fork towards which Hamilton was galloping.

The right arm swung towards the Wetmore ranch, where at certain times
during the course of the year a hundred cow-punchers reported on the stock
that grazed in four States. At certain seasons, likewise, despite the fact
that the ranch was well into the foot-hill country, there might be found a
New York family playing at life primeval with the co-operation of
porcelain bath-tubs, a French _chef_, and electric light.

The left fork of the road had a meaner destiny. It dipped straight into
desolation, penetrating a naked wilderness where bad men skulked till the
evil they had done was forgotten in deeds that called afresh to Heaven for
vengeance. It was well away on this west fork of the road that they
lynched Kate Watson--"Cattle Kate"--for the crime of loyalty. It was she,
intrepid and reckless, who threatened the horde of masked scoundrels when
they came to lynch her man for the iniquity of raising a few vegetables on
a strip of ground that cut into their grazing country. And when she,
recognizing them, masked though they were, threatened them with the
vengeance of the law, they hanged her with her man high as Haman.

Judith watched Hamilton with narrowing eyes. And now she was all Indian,
the white w