"Nonsense!" laughed the man. "You're grossly prejudiced. You were in love with me anyway--you know you were. You would have married me in time." "I was not! I wasn't a bit in love with you--and I wouldn't have married you ever, if it hadn't been for the test." She paused suddenly, and her eyes became serious, "But Win, Tex stood the test too--and he really did love me. Do you know that my heart just aches for that boy, out there all alone in the country he loves--for he _is_ of different stuff than the rest of them. He likes the men--he is one of them--but he would never choose a wife from among their women, and his big heart is just yearning for a woman's love. I shall never forget the last time I saw him--in that little open glade in the timber. He had lost, and he knew it--and he stood there with his arm thrown over the neck of his horse, staring out over the broad bench toward the mountains that showed hazy-blue in the distance. He was game to the last fibre of him. He tried to conceal his hurt, but he could not conceal it. He spoke highly of you--said you were a _man_--and that I had made no mistake in my choice--and then he spoke the words that filled my cup of happiness to the brim--he told me that you had not killed Purdy--that there was no blood on your hands--and that you were not a fugitive from the law. "Win, dear--we must find him--we've got to find him!" "We'll find him--little girl," answered her husband as his arm stole about her shoulders; "I'm just as anxious to find him as you are--_and in ten days we will start_!" CHAPTER I AN ANNIVERSARY The Texan drew up in the centre of a tiny glade that formed an opening in the bull pine woods. Haze purpled the distant mountains of cow-land, and the cowpuncher's gaze strayed slowly from the serried peaks of the Bear Paws to rest upon the broad expanse of the barren, mica-studded bad lands with their dazzling white alkali beds, and their brilliant red and black mosaic of lava rock that trembled and danced and shimmered in the crinkly waves of heat. For a long time he stared at the Missouri whose yellow-brown waters rolled wide and deep from recent rains. From the silver and gold of the flashing waters his eyes strayed to the smoke-grey sage flats that intervened, and then to the cool dark green of the pines.