Thus drifted by the late fall and early winter. Bit by bit the days grew shorter; and then as a pendulum vibrates, lengthened shade by shade. No human being came their way, nor wild thing, save roving murderers on pillage bent. Even the cowmen he employed, the old hands he and Bess had both known for years, avoided him obviously, stubbornly. After the execution of the will he had built them another ranch house at a distance on the range, and there they congregated and clung. They accepted his money and obeyed his orders unquestioningly; but further than that--they were white and he was red. Howard, the one man with whom he had been friendly, had grown restless and drifted on--whither no one knew. Save for the Irish overseer and one other cowboy, the old Buffalo Butte ranch was deserted. Locally, there neither was nor had been any outward manifestation of hostility, nor even gossip. But the olden times when the hospitable ranch house of Colonel William Landor was the meeting point of ranchers within a radius of fifty miles were gone. They did not persecute the new master or his white wife; they did a subtler, crueller thing: they ignored them. To the Indian's face, when by infrequent chance they met, they were affable, obliging. His reputation had spread too far for them to appear otherwise; but, again, they were white and he was red--and between them the chasm yawned. Thus passed the months. Winter, dead and relentless, held its sway. It was a normal winter; but ever in this unprotected land the period was one of inevitable decimation, of a weeding out of the unfit. Here and there upon the range, dark against the now background of universal white, stared forth the carcass of a weakling. Over it for a few nights the coyotes and grey wolves howled and fought; then would come a fresh layer of white, and the spot where it had been would merge once more into the universal colour scheme. Even the prairie chickens vanished, migrated to southern lands where corn was king. No more at daylight or at dusk could one hear the whistle of their passing wings, or the booming of their rallying call. Magnificent in any season, this impression of the wild was even more pronounced now. The thought of God is synonymous with immensity; and so being, Deity was here eternally manifest, ubiquitous. The human mind could not conceive a more infinite bigness than this gleaming frost-bound waste stretched to the horizon beneath the blazing winter sun. Magnificent it was beyond the power of words to describe; but lonely, lonely. Within the tiny cottage, the girl, Bess, drew the curtains tight over the single window and for days at a time did not glance without.