long slope to the top, struck the
trail and headed straight north with a low line of hills for their
goal. And in the hour and a half of riding, neither spoke a dozen
words.

At the door of her own home Billy left her, and gathered up the reins
of the Pilgrim's horse. "Well, good-by. Oh, that's all right--it
wasn't any trouble at all," he said huskily when she tried to thank
him, and galloped away.

CHAPTER III.

_Charming Billy Has a Fight._

If Billy Boyle had any ideals he did not recognize them as such, and
he would not have known just how to answer you if you had asked him
what was his philosophy of life. He was range-bred--as purely Western
as were the cattle he tended--but he was not altogether ignorant of
the ways of the world, past or present. He had that smattering of
education which country schools and those of "the county seat" may
give a boy who loves a horse better than books, and who, sitting
hunched behind his geography, dreams of riding afar, of shooting wild
things and of sleeping under the stars.

From the time he was sixteen he had lived chiefly in tents and
line-camp cabins, his world the land of far horizons, of big sins, and
virtues bigger. One creed he owned: to live "square," fight square,
and to be loyal to his friends and his "outfit." Little things did
not count much with him, and for that reason he was the more enraged
against the Pilgrim, because he did not quite know what it was all
about. So far as he had heard or seen, the Pilgrim had offered no
insult to Miss Bridger--"the girl," as he called her simply in
his mind. Still, he had felt all along that the mere presence of the
Pilgrim was an offense to her, no less real because it was intangible
and not to be put into words; and for that offense the Pilgrim must
pay.

But for the presence of the Pilgrim, he told himself ill-temperedly,
they might have waited for breakfast; but he had been so anxious to
get her away from under the man's leering gaze that he had not thought
of eating. And if the Pilgrim had been a _man_, he might have sent him
over to Bridger's for her father and a horse. But the Pilgrim would
have lost himself, or have refused to go, and the latter possibility
would have caused a scene unfit for the eyes of a young woman.

So he rode slowly and thought of many things he might have done which
would have been better than what he did do; and wondered what the
girl thought about it and if she blamed him for no