They were gone as they had come, lumbering rapidly, and as they passed northward the southern breeze carried the sound away. It died out quickly, and for minutes longer than was needed he stood listening, listening. Then, at last, he turned back to his horse. In the two years of his sojourn on the land it was the first time he had witnessed the operation of the Lightfoot gang, and it left a deep impression upon his mind. A great resentment rose up in him. It was the natural temper of a man who is concerned, in however small a degree, in the cattle industry. And his anger urged him to a greater speed for home, and a greater sympathy for the man who was prepared to accept the Judas money offered for the lives of this gang of criminals. CHAPTER III TRAILING THE "BLACK TAIL" The woman started. She threw up her head. Her wide eyes, wonderful and dark, searched the deep aisles of the shaded pine woods about her. Her hair hung loosely in a knot at the nape of her neck, and its intensely dark masses made an exquisite framing for the oval of the handsome face beneath the loose brim of wide prairie hat. The stillness of these wooded slopes of the Cathills was profound. They possessed something of the solemnity belonging to the parent range of the Rockies beyond. For they were almost primeval. The woman might have belonged to them, her dark beauty so harmonized with its surroundings. Yet for all her coloring, for all the buckskin she wore for upper garment, there was nothing in her nature of the outlands which now claimed her. She was of the cities. She was bred and nurtured in the civilized places. The life about her was another life. It was crude and foreign to her. It claimed her by force of circumstance against every instinct and emotion. Her searching ceased, and her eyes fixed their steady regard upon a gray-brown object moving amongst the myriad of black stanchions which supported the tousled roof of melancholy green foliage above her. With an almost imperceptible movement one buckskin clad arm reached slowly out toward the small sporting rifle which leaned against an adjacent tree-trunk. Her whole poise was tense and steady. There was in her attitude that hard decision which one associates only with the experienced hunter. There was almost too much decision in a woman so obviously young.