back at him.

"It was so unnecessary," she said bitterly. "They were playing so
prettily and happily."

"I watched them for ten minutes before I shot," he said. "Their play
was interesting, I'll admit. But they were bears, just the same.
They'd grow up some day and I wonder if they'd take mercy then on a
pretty little baby calf if they came upon it playing? Your father'd
thank me, my tender hearted Miss."

She bit her lip and turned away from him. He watched her a moment,
then called,

"Are you riding back to the house? My horse is right back there and
I'll ride with you."

"No," she answered quietly. "I'm not going back just yet."

She walked on to where the dead cub lay--stood looking down on it a
moment and then moved on. Hume watched her while he filled his pipe
and lighted it, and went in turn to look at his game. He turned the
little beast over with his foot, noted with satisfaction the hole which
the bullet had torn through the soft body, and then strolled toward his
horse. Wanda saw him ride away in the direction of her home, smoking
his pipe.

"All men like to hunt, to kill things," she mused. "Are they as cruel
about it as he is? Would Wayne have watched the little things playing
for ten minutes and then, when he tired of it, shot them in the midst
of their play?"

Not until Sledge Hume had topped a gentle rise and dropped down and out
of sight upon the farther side, did the girl turn quickly to the great
cedar up which she had seen the escaping cub scramble. She was certain
that he had not come down. When at first she did not see him she
circled the tree slowly, expecting from each new angle to catch a
glimpse of the roly-poly brown body. And when, after fifteen minutes
peering upward through the widely flung, horizontal branches, she saw
him, a swift inspiration came to her; her quarry had not escaped her
yet.

The tree, one of the giants of her father's ranch that she knew very
well, thrust its crest upward so close to the cliffs that many of the
branches had been bent this way and that, flattening against the
granite. The lowest limb, twenty feet above the girl's head, was as
thick as many a tall tree hereabouts, and was like a giant's arm, bent
at the elbow, thrusting the rocks back. She could make her way up this
far, working along a ragged fissure in the cliff; thence she could edge
out upon the broad limb until she came to the trunk itself. And once
there, to Wanda in he