The next morning, after breakfast, which shortly followed the rising of the sun, Bissell called Bud Larkin aside just as that young man had headed for the corral to rope and saddle Pinte. Gone was any hint of the man of the night before. His red face was sober, and his brown eyes looked into Bud's steel-gray ones with a piercing, almost menacing, intensity. "I hope any friend of Julie's will continue to be my friend," was all he said, but the glance and manner attending this delicate hint left no doubt as to his meaning. His whole attitude spelled "sheep!" "That depends entirely upon you, Mr. Bissell," was Larkin's rejoinder. The cowman turned away without any further words, and Bud continued on to the corral. At the enclosure he found Stelton roping a wiry and vicious calico pony, and when he had finally cinched the saddle on Pinte, he turned to see Julie at his side. "You had better invite me to ride a little way with you," she said, laughing, "because I am coming anyhow." "Bless you! What a treat!" cried Bud happily, and helped to cinch up the calico, who squealed at every tug. Stelton, his dark face flushed to the color of mahogany, sullenly left him the privilege and walked away. Presently they mounted, and Bud, with a loud "So-long" and a wave of the hand to some of the punchers, turned south. Julie, loping beside him, looked up curiously at this. "I thought you were going north, Bud," she cried. "Changed my plans overnight," he replied non-committally, and she did not press the subject further, feeling, with a woman's intuition, that war was in the air. Ten miles south, at the ford of the southern branch of Grass Creek, she drew up her horse as the signal for their separation, and faced north. Bud, still headed southward, put Pinte alongside of her and took her hand. "It's been a blessing to see you, you're so civilized," she said, half-seriously. "Do come again." "Then you do sometimes miss the things you have been educated to?" "Yes, Bud, I do, but not often. Seeing you has brought back a flood of memories that I am happier without." "And that is what you have done for me, dear girl," he said in a low tone as he pressed her hand. The next moment, with a nonchalant "So-long," the parting of the plains, he had dug the spurs into his horse and ridden away. For a minute the girl sat looking after this one link between her desolate existence and the luxury and society he still represented in her eyes. "His manners have changed for the worse," she thought, recalling his abrupt departure, "but I think he has changed for the better." Which remark proves that her sense of relative masculine values was still sound. Larkin continued on directly south-east for twenty miles, until he crossed the Big Horn at what is now the town of Kirby. Thence his course lay south rather than east until he should raise the white dust of his first flock.