Sooner or later, he told himself, as he had told McKane, the steady rays of his searching glass would reveal in her the thing he knew was there. This was not logic, it was instinct—a poor thing for a sheriff to base his actions on, apparently, but Price Selwood based his thereon in unwavering confidence. And if he could have looked into the living-room at Sky Line that day he would have jotted in his mental note-book as correct, one premise—for the mistress sat again at her dark wood desk and read a letter, and her face was well worth watching. The letter bore a New York postmark, and its terms were sharp and decisive, almost legal, leaving no doubt of their meaning. Thus they carried to her consciousness a clear presentment of satisfaction concerning the last shipment of cattle, and just as clear an avowal of affection. Kate Cathrew’s sharp face was suffused with a light not meant for any eyes at Sky Line as she read and reread the sheets in her hands. At their concluding words—“and so think I shall be with you at the usual time”—her lips parted over her teeth in a slow smile which was the visible embodiment of passion, while her dark eyes became for a moment slumbrous with the same surging force. There _was_ a man this woman loved, if ever a face spoke truth, and he was the writer of the letter. Though the scattered denizens of the outside world of Nameless knew nothing of this, it was covertly known at Sky Line. Every one of the hard-eyed band of riders knew it, with varying feelings, Minnie Pine knew it and old Josefa. Big Basford knew it and his red-rimmed eyes glowed with the light of murder when he watched Kate sit on the veranda with Lawrence Arnold in the long summer days while the light drowsed down from the high blue vault and Rainbow Cliff sent down its prismatic colors shining afar over the slopes of Mystery. There was a look in the woman’s dusky eyes that was plain as print—the hot, unsmiling, inflammable look of untempered passion. Now she folded the letter, slipped it back in its envelope and put it away in a drawer of the desk which she locked securely with a key on a ring that she took from a pocket in her neat outing skirt. The act was indicative of Kate Cathrew’s mode of life in her high domain. All things were ordered, filed and locked, so to speak, and she alone was the master. A little later she went out on the broad veranda and sat down in the deep willow chair which rocked there, stirred fantastically by the stiff breeze which swept in across the great blue gulf of space between the peaks. Her eyes dropped down and down the wooded slopes of Mystery slanting beneath her to the long green flats on Nameless, the equally long brown spaces of Nance Allison’s tilled field. Sight of that field was a barb in her consciousness. It never failed to stir her to slow and resurgent anger. It was an affront to her arrogant autocracy, a challenge and a taunt.