The young ranger was highly exalted by this visit, and he was also greatly disturbed, for the more he thought of that warning letter and the conditions which gave rise to it, the more menacing it became. It was all of a piece with the tone and character of the Shellfish gang, for this remote valley had long borne an evil reputation, and Watson and Kitsong had been its dominating spirits for more than twenty years and deeply resented Kauffman's settlement in the canyon. "It would be just like old Kit to take the law into his own hands," the ranger admitted to himself. "And the writing in that letter looked to me like Mrs. Abe Kitsong's." Instead of going up to the Heart Lake sheep-camp, as he had planned to do, he turned back to his station, moved by a desire to keep as near the girl as his duties would permit. "For the next few days I'd better be within call," he decided. "They may decide to arrest her--and if they do, she'll need me." He went about his evening meal like a man under the influence of a drug, and when he sat down to his typewriter his mind was so completely filled with visions of his entrancing neighbor that he could not successfully cast up a column of figures. He lit his pipe for a diversion, but under the spell of the smoke his recollection of just how she looked, how she spoke, how she smiled (that sad, half-lighting of her face) set all his nerves atingle. He grew restless. "What's the matter with me?" he asked himself, sharply, but dared not answer his own question. He knew his malady. His unrest was that of the lover. Thereafter he gave himself up to the quiet joy of reviewing each word she had uttered, and in doing so came to the conclusion that she was in the mountains not so much for the cure of her lungs or throat as to heal the hurt of some injustice. What it was he could not imagine, but he believed that she was getting over it. "As she gets over it she'll find life on the Shellfish intolerable and she'll go away," he reasoned, and the thought of her going made his country lonesome, empty, and of no account. "I wish she wouldn't go about barefoot," he added, with a tinge of jealousy. "And she mustn't let any of the Shellfish gang see her in that dress." He was a little comforted by remembering her sudden flight when she first perceived him coming across the bridge, and he wondered whether the trustful attitude she afterward assumed was due entirely to the fact that he was a Federal officer--he hoped not. Some part of it sprang, he knew, from a liking for him.