h and
gave a queer little sob. She watched him, wide-eyed and white, till
he was quite out of sight and then went in and shut the door upon the
quiet, early spring twilight.

As for Billy, he was gone to find the Pilgrim. Just what he would do
when he did find him was not quite plain, because he was promising
himself so many deeds of violence that no man could possibly perform
them all upon one victim. At the creek, he was going to "shoot him
like a coyote." A quarter of a mile farther, he would "beat his damn'
head off," and, as if those were not deaths sufficient, he was after
that determined to "take him by the heels and snap his measly head off
like yuh would a grass snake!"

Threatened as he was, the Pilgrim nevertheless escaped, because
Billy did not happen to come across him before his rage had cooled to
reason. He rode on to Hardup, spent the night there swallowing more
whisky than he had drunk before in six months, and after that playing
poker with a recklessness that found a bitter satisfaction in losing
and thus proving how vilely the world was using him, and went home
rather unsteadily at sunrise and slept heavily in the bunk-house all
that day. For Billy Boyle was distressingly human in his rages as in
his happier moods, and was not given to gentle, picturesque melancholy
and to wailing at the silent stars.

CHAPTER XX.

_The Shadow Lies Long_.

What time he was compelled to be in the house, in the few remaining
days before round-up, he avoided Flora or was punctiliously polite.
Only once did he address her directly by name, and then he called her
Miss Bridger with a stiff formality that made Mama Joy dimple with
spiteful satisfaction. Flora replied by calling him Mr. Boyle, and
would not look at him.

Then it was all in the past, and Billy was out on the range learning
afresh how sickeningly awry one's plans may go. As mile after mile
of smiling grass-land was covered by the sweep of the Double-Crank
circles, the disaster pressed more painfully upon him. When the wagons
had left the range the fall before, Billy had estimated roughly that
eight or nine thousand head of Double-Crank stock wandered at will in
the open. But with the gathering and the calf-branding he knew that
the number had shrunk woefully. Of the calves he had left with their
mothers in the fall, scarce one remained; of the cows themselves he
could find not half, and the calf-branding was becoming a grim joke
among the men.