Both men knew well how it had happened. Bangs had run across the camp of some of the wild bunch, men he had known for long, and the slow-thinking youth had suspected no more danger from riding on up to them at this time than at any other. He had told them of the shot fired at Harris and they had known that some other Three Bar man would find the trail leading from the direction of their camp. And Bangs would mention having found them there, linking them with the bushwhacker. When Bangs had left a pair of them had ridden a distance with him and accomplished their aim. "It's coming dark," Harris said. "And by morning they'll be thirty miles away. That sort of a killing was never fastened on to any man yet." The old man raised a doubled fist and his face was lined with sorrow. "Bangs was almost a son to me," he said. "I taught him to ride--and we've rode together on every job since then. You hear me! Some one is going to die for this!" It was an hour after sundown when they reached the wagon with all that was earthly of Bangs lashed across the blue horse and it was midnight before the five men who had followed the trail returned with the word that they had been unable to even sight the man they tracked. During the next week the girl inwardly accused the men of heartlessness. They jested as carelessly as if nothing unusual had occurred and she heard no mention of Bangs. It seemed that it took but a day for them to forget a former comrade who had come to an untimely end. Rile Foster had disappeared but on the fifth day he turned up at the Three Bar wagon and resumed his work without the least explanation of his absence. The old man was gloomy and silent, his face set in sorrowful lines as he went about his work, and it was evident that he was continually brooding over the fate of the youth he had loved. It seemed to the girl that the men were even more cheerful and thoughtless than usual, that they concerned their minds with every conceivable topic except that which was uppermost in her own. The death of Bangs had affected them not at all. She could not shake off the remembrance of the boy's adoring gaze as his eyes had followed every move she made and in some vague way she felt that she was responsible for the accident. She often rode near Rile Foster, knowing what was in his mind. He spoke but little and, in common with the rest, he never once mentioned Bangs. At the end of a week Slade rode up to the wagon as the men were working the cows gathered in the second circle of the day. He jerked his head to draw her aside out of range of Waddles's ears. "How's the Three Bar showing up this spring?" he asked abruptly. "Better than ever," she retorted and he caught a note of defiance in her voice. "You're lying, Billie," he asserted calmly. "The Three Bar will show another shrinkage this year."