Bearing a little west of the North Star, I kept the red horse at a steady jog, and when the night was far spent and my bones aching from the ride I came to another river—the Marias—which Wall had told me I must cross. Following his directions, a half-hour’s journey upstream brought me upon a trail; a few wagon-tracks that I near overlooked. This led to a ford, or what may once have been a ford. It no longer merited the term, for I got well soaked in the deep, swift stream. Red carried me through, however, and when I gained the farther bank of the Marias Valley a faint reddish glow was creeping up in the east. In a little while it was broad day. Then I halted for the first time. My mettlesome steed I picketed carefully, ate a little of the biscuits and boiled beef, and lay down to sleep in a grassy hollow, too tired to care whether Bax was hard on my trail or not. The sunlight had given me a fresh access of courage, I think—that and the heady air of those crisp morning hours. My difficulties began to take on some of the aspects of an adventure. Once in the Territories, with none to hound me, I could apprise Bolton and he would forward money to get me home. That was all I needed. And if I could not manage to eke out a living in the meantime I was not the son of my father. I fell asleep with a wistful eye on three blue spires that broke the smooth sweep of the skyline to the northward—the Sweet Grass Hills, touching on the Canadian boundary, if I remembered rightly what Wall had said. The hot noon sun beating on my unprotected face roused me at last. It was near midday. I had no liking for further moonlight travel, so I saddled up and rode on, thinking to get somewhere near the Hills by dusk, and camp there for the night. I was now over my first fear of being followed; but, oh, my hearers, I was stiff and sore! A forty or fifty mile jaunt is not much to a seasoned rider—but I lacked seasoning; however, I was due to get it. A little before sundown I rode into the long shadow of West Butte, in rare good humor with myself despite the ache in my legs, for by grace of my good red horse I had covered a wonderful stretch that afternoon, and my nag was yet stepping out lightly. On either hand loomed the rugged pyramids of the Sweet Grass—which in truth are not hills at all, but three boulder-strewn, pine-clad mountains rising abruptly out of a rolling plain. The breaks of Milk River, in its over-the-border curve, showed plainly in the distance. I was nearing the City of Refuge. There in that shadow-darkened notch between the lofty pinnacles I came to a new fork in the Trouble Trail. I did not know it then, but later I could not gainsay the fact. And the mile-post that directed my uncertain steps was merely a strain of the devil in the blaze-faced sorrel I bestrode. Had he been of a less turbulent spirit I doubt much if I should ever have fallen in with Slowfoot George.