Swan, with his plate filled and his coffee well sweetened, proceeded to relate with much detail the story of Brit's misfortune. "By golly, I don't see how he don't get killed," he finished, helping himself to another biscuit. "By _golly_, I don't. Falling into Spirit Canyon is like getting dragged by a horse. It should kill a man. What you think, Lone?" "It didn't, you say." Lone's eyes were turned to his coffee cup. "It don't kill Brit Hunter--not yet. I think maybe he dies with all his bones broke, like that. By golly, that shows you what could happen if a man don't think. Brit should look at that chain on his wheel before he starts down that road." "Oh. His brake didn't hold, eh?" "I look at that wagon," Swan answered carefully. "It is something funny about that chain. I worked hauling logs in the mountains, once. It is something damn funny about that chain, the way it's fixed." Lone did not ask him for particulars, as perhaps Swan expected. He did not speak at all for awhile, but presently pushed back his plate as if his appetite were gone. "It's like Fred Thurman," Swan continued moralising. "If Fred don't ride backwards, I bet he don't get killed--like that." "Where's Brit now?" Lone asked, getting up and putting on his hat. "At the ranch?" "Or heaven, maybe," Swan responded sententiously. "But my dog Yack, he don't howl yet. I guess Brit's at the ranch." "Sorry I'm busy to-day," said Lone, opening the door. "You stay as long as you like, Swan. I've got some riding to do." "I'll wash the dishes, and then I maybe will think quicker than that coyote. I'm after him, by golly, till I get him." Lone muttered something and went out. Within five minutes Swan, hearing hoofbeats, looked out through a crack in the door and saw Lone riding at a gallop along the trail to Rock City. "Good bait. He swallows the hook," he commented to himself, and his good-natured grin was not brightening his face while he washed the dishes and tidied the cabin. With Lone rode bitterness of soul and a sick fear that had nothing to do with his own destiny. How long ago Brit had been hurled into the canyon Lone did not know; he had not asked. But he judged that it must have been very recently. Swan had not told him of anything but the runaway, and of helping to carry Brit home--and of the "damn funny thing about the chain"--the rough-lock, he must have meant. Too well Lone understood the sinister meaning that probably lay behind that phrase. "They've started on the Quirt now," he told himself with foreboding. "She's been telling her father----"