The roan squatted and ducked sidewise, and Lance raised his head. Down the rough trail rode a big cowpuncher with sun-reddened face and an air of great weariness. His horse plodded wearily, thin-flanked, his black hair sweat-roughened and dingy. The rider looked at Lance with red-veined eyes, the inflamed lids showing sleepless nights. "How'r yuh?" he greeted perfunctorily, as they passed each other. "Howdy," said Lance imperturbably, and rode on. Lance's eyebrows pulled together. He had no need of looking back; he had seen a great deal in the one glance he had given the stranger. He scrutinized the trail, measured with his eyes the size and the shape of the horse's footprints. After a little he left the wagon road and put the roan to the steep climb up the trail to the great Tooth of the ridge. He still frowned, still rode with bent head, his eyes on the trail. But now he was alert, conscious of his surroundings, thinking of every yard of ground they covered. At a little distance from the base of the Tooth he dismounted, tying the restive roan to a bush to prevent him from wandering around, nibbling investigatingly at weeds, bushes, all the things that interest a young horse. Slowly, walking carefully on rocks, Lance approached the Tooth. A new look was in his face now,--a look half tender, half angry because of the tenderness. Several times he had met Mary Hope here at the Tooth, when he was just a long-legged youth with a fondness for teasing, and she was a slim, wide-eyed little thing in short skirts and sunbonnet. Always the meetings had pretended to be accidental, and always Mary Hope had seemed very much interested in the magnificent outlook and very slightly interested in him. From the signs, some one else was much interested in the view. Lance came upon a place where a man had slipped with one foot and left the deep mark of his boot in the loose, gravelly soil. Sitting on a boulder, he made a leisurely survey of the place and counted three cigarette stubs that had fallen short of the crevice toward which they had evidently been flung. How many had gone into the crevice he could not tell. He slid off the boulder and, walking on a rock shelf that jutted out from the huge upthrust rock, examined the place very thoroughly. At a certain spot where Mary Hope had been fond of sitting on the rock shelf with her straight little back against the Tooth's smooth side, a splendid view of the Devil's Tooth ranch was to be had. The house itself was hidden in a cottonwood grove that Belle had planted when she was a bride, but the corrals, the pastures, the road up the Ridge was plainly visible. And in the shallow crack in the rock was another cigarette end, economically smoked down to a three-quarter-inch stub.