Louise learned to love the plains country. She revelled in its winds; the high ones, blowing bold and free with their call to throw off lethargy and stay from drifting; the low ones, sighing and rustling through the already dead grass—a mournful and whispering lament for the Summer gone. She had thought to become reconciled to the winds the last of all. She was a prim little soul with all her sweet graciousness, and dearly desired her fair hair ever to be in smooth and decorous coil or plait. Strangely enough, the winds won her first allegiance. She loved to climb to the summit of one of the barren hills flanking the river and stand there while the wind just blew and blew. Loosened tendrils of hair bothered her little these days. She relegated hats and puny, impotent hat-pins to oblivion. Her hair roughened and her fair skin tanned, but neither did these things bother her. It was the strength of the wind and the freedom, and because it might blow where it listed without regard to the arbitrary and self-important will of strutting man, that enthralled her imagination. It came about that the bigness and loneliness of this big country assumed a like aspect. It was not yet subjugated. The vastness of it and the untrammelled freedom of it, though it took her girl’s breath away, was to dwell with her forever, a sublime memory, even when the cow country—unsubjugated—was only a retrospection of silver hairs. Mary, because of her abounding health, healed of her wound rapidly. Langford took advantage of the girls’ absorption in each other’s company to ride often and at length on quests of his own creation. With October, Louise must join Judge Dale for the Autumn term of court. He haunted the hills. He was not looking now for a living man; he was seeking a cleverly concealed grave. He flouted the opinion—held by many—that the body had been thrown into the Missouri and would wash ashore some later day many and many a mile below. He held firmly to his fixed idea that impenetrable mystery clouding the ultimate close of Williston’s earthly career was the sought aim of his murderers, and they would risk no river’s giving up its dead to their undoing. It had been ascertained beyond reasonable doubt that Williston could not have left the country in any of the usual modes. His description was at all the stations along the line, together with the theory that he would be leaving under compulsion.