ers of his guns, swore.

"Darn 'f I b'lieve we've touched hide nor hair. They got horses up
there. What darn fools we was to camp down in this bottom. There they go
now."

Angus could hear the faint drumming of hoofs over the hill. There was
nothing to be done about it. Disgusted they went back to their blankets,
but not to sleep, and with dawn they returned to investigate.

An endeavor had been made to tear out the wall of the ditch, and above
it a hole had been started, apparently with intent to use powder. A shot
there would have split off a section of the precipitous bank, and
brought it down, trees and all, into the ditch. Angus, surveying these
things with lowering brow, saw Rennie stoop and pick up something.

"What have you got there?" the latter asked.

Without a word Rennie handed him an old, stag-handled jack-knife. Angus
knew it very well. He himself had given it to his brother, Turkey.

Angus stared at the knife, at first blankly and then with swiftly
blackening brow. He heard Dave's voice as from a distance.

"Now don't go off at half-cock, Angus. Maybe--"

"You know the knife," he said, his own voice sounding strange in his
ears.

"Well, that don't say Turkey was in this. Maybe he lost it, and
somebody--"

"Quit lying to yourself!"

"By gosh, Angus, I'll bet Turkey don't know a darn thing--"

But Angus was not listening. Out of the glory of the sun rising over the
ranges, one of the black moods of the Black Mackays descended on him.
All his life he had struggled against the hardness and bitterness of
heart inherited from his ancestors, men dour and vengeful, whose creed
had been eye for eye and tooth for tooth through the clan feuds of the
dim centuries. Hard and bitter men, these bygone Mackays whose blood ran
in his veins, carrying the black hate in the heart, even brother against
brother. There was even that Mackay of a dark memory--and his name, too,
was Torquil--who after a quarrel with his brothers had slain them, all
four. Old tales, these, handed down through the years, losing or gaining
in the telling, perhaps, but all stormy and full of violence and hate
and revenge. And in all of them there was never one of a Mackay who
forgave an injury. One and all they brooded over wrong and struck in
their own time. With them it was not the quick word and blow--though if
other tales were true they were quick enough with both--but the deep,
sullen, undying resentment under injury.

As he thou