They were off at last, with Marylyn watching them from a window, and Dallas walking alongside for a few rods to say good-by and to pat Shadrach's bony, white flanks encouragingly. Morning was stealing up the dun east, yet overhead the stars were shining. And their near radiance, reflected upon the snow, coupled with the light of the slowly growing dawn, made it possible for the girls to follow the travellers' straight course for miles. But long after Marylyn left the window, the elder girl remained outside. The dun of the east was painted out with uprushing waves of pink. The stars sank back into the heavens, grew smaller and dimmer, and, one by one, disappeared. Finally, a yellow rind, haloed in mist, was thrust above the level of the prairie. As Dallas greeted it, the distant ridge of a snow-drift, rose-tinged like the sky, hid the crawling speck that was the pung. * * * * * On his arrival behind David Bond, Nick Matthews had found that full pockets were plentiful among the soldiery, and had promptly gone about emptying them. Soon after entering The Trooper's Delight, he sat down to a chip-piled table. His quarry surrounded him. And there he stayed throughout the long night, wide-awake, sharp-witted, unwearied, adding to his heap of coloured discs honestly and otherwise. Not until reveille, a clarion warning, sent his fellow-players scurrying back across the river, did he put his cards one side and throw himself down. For, though a confirmed night-hawk, he needed a short nap to prepare for some business that lay before him. "Babe," a direct contrast to his brother, being thick-necked, stumpy and dark, had not failed to garner his share of the rich harvest. From his station behind the long counter, which was made of four heavy planks supported on barrels at either end, he had poured strange mixtures into beer mugs and exchanged them for good government coin. When he was not performing his part as bartender, he was scraping illy timed tunes upon a fiddle. It was he who was left in charge when, shortly after noon, his brother awoke, swallowed some whisky and armed himself with a brace of pistols. Then, with no word to the few loungers in the saloon, the latter set out, following the road that led up the river to the ferry-landing. At the cut, he climbed the bank at a leisurely pace and continued his way eastward, making straight across the snow toward the squat shack of the Lancasters. His approach was instantly marked. Marylyn was once more at her post, studying the square of landscape framed by a window. When he made a quick figure on that landscape, she saw him, and called to Dallas. "Here's someone coming," she announced, inwardly glad at the possibility of diversion. Dallas hurriedly joined her. "Who can it be?" she asked. The door was unbolted, the other window not fastened. Yet so far were her thoughts from molestation that she left them so. "Going to ask him in?" questioned Marylyn.