tiny hoof beat at the
half-frozen ground rhythmically.

"All right, then, Bess," he said at last. "You mustn't sit there in the
window. It's getting chilly. Good-night."

The girl drew back until her face was in shadow.

"Good-night," she echoed for the second time, and the shade closed as
before.

For five minutes longer the Indian sat as he was, bare of head,
motionless; but the light did not return, nor did he hear a sound, and
at last he rode slowly out the gate and toward his own quarters.

The place where he lived was exactly a half mile from the Buffalo Butte
ranch house, and due north. Originally a one-room shack, grudgingly
built according to government requirements to prove up on a homestead,
it had recently been enlarged by the addition of a second larger room,
and as a whole the place further improved by the building of a sod and
weather-board barn. The reason for this was obvious, to one acquainted
with the tenant's habits particularly so. Just how long the Indian had
remained separate, just why he had first made the change, Landor himself
could hardly have told. Suffice it to say it had been for years, and in
all that time, even in the coldest weather, the voluntary exile had
never lived under a roof. Primitive or evolved as it might be, as youth
and as man, the Indian was a tent-dweller. Just now the little house was
being fitted up for occupancy, How himself doing it at odd moments of
the day and at evenings; but as yet he still lived, as always, under
eight by ten feet of canvas near at hand.

A lighted tent stands out very distinctly by contrast against a dark
horizon, and almost before he had left the ranch house yard the man on
the impatient, mouse-coloured broncho knew that he had company; yet,
characteristic in his every action, he did not hurry. Methodically he
put up the pony in the new barn, fed and bedded him for the night. From
the adjoining stall, out of the darkness, there came a nasal puppyish
whine and the protest of a straining chain. Had it been daylight, an
observer would have seen a woolly grey ball with a pointed nose and a
pair of sharp eyes tugging at the end of that tether; but as it was, two
gleaming eyes, very close together, were all that were visible. It was
to the owner of these eyes that the man gave the scraps from his lunch
remaining in the saddlebag. For it, as for the pony, he made a bed;
then--though the little beast was only a grey prairie wolf, it was a
baby an