As the sun sank below the horizon, the Texan turned his horse toward McWhorter's. He paused on a rocky spur for one last look over the bad lands, and raising his gauntleted fist, he shook it in the face of the solitude: "I'll get you! Damn you! _Damn you!_" As he whirled his horse and headed him out into the open bench, a squat, bow-legged man peered out from behind a rock, not fifty feet from where the Texan had sat his horse. A tuft of hair protruded from a hole in the crown of his battered hat as he fingered his stubby beard: "Pretty damn lively for a corpse," grinned the squat man, "an' he _will_ git him, too. An' if that there gal wasn't safe at Cinnabar Joe's, I'd see that he got him tonight. It looks from here as if God A'mighty's gittin' ready to call Purdy's bluff." CHAPTER XIX AT MCWHORTER'S RANCH Colin McWhorter was a man of long silences. A big framed, black-bearded giant of a man, he commanded the respect of all who knew him, and the friendship of few. His ranch, his sheep, his daughter were things that concerned him--the rest of the world was for others. Twice each year, on the twentieth of June and the third of December, he locked himself in his room and drank himself very drunk. At all other times he was very sober. No one, not even Janet, knew the significance of those dates. All the girl knew was that with deadly certainty when the day arrived her father would be locked in his room, and that on the third day thereafter he would unlock the door and come out of the room, shaken in nerve and body, dispose of an armful of empty bottles, resume his daily routine, and never by word or look would he refer to the matter. These semi-annual sprees had been among the girl's earliest recollections. They had come as regularly and as certainly as the passing of the seasons, and she had come to accept them as a matter of course. Janet McWhorter stood in no fear of her father, yet never had she brought herself to venture one word of remonstrance, nor offer one word of sympathy. His neighbours accepted the fact as they accepted McWhorter--with respect. If they wondered, they continued to wonder, for so far as anyone knew nobody had ever had the temerity to seek knowledge at its fountain head. McWhorter's habit of silence was not engendered by any feeling of aloofness--cowpunchers, sheep-men, horse-thieves, or nesters--all were welcome at his cabin, and while they talked, McWhorter listened--listened and smoked his black pipe. With Janet he was as sparing of words as with others. Father and daughter understood each other perfectly--loved each other with a strange undemonstrative love that was as unfaltering as the enduring hills.