Me Smith

Smith take a flower gently from Dora’s hand and, with some significant word, lay it with care between the leaves of a pocket note-book.
    Though it looked more to Ralston, all that Smith had said was, “It might bring me luck.” And Dora had smiled at his superstition.
    Ralston would have turned back had it not been too late: his horse’s feet among the rocks had caused them to look up. As he passed Dora replied to some commonplace, with heightened color, and Smith stared in silent triumph.
    Ralston cursed himself and the mischance which had taken him to that spot.
    “She’ll think I was spying upon her, like some ignorant, jealous fool!” he told himself savagely. “Why, why, is it that I must always blunder upon such scenes, to make me miserable for days! Can it be—can it possibly be,” he asked himself—“that she cares for the man; that she encourages him; that she has a foolish, Quixotic notion that she can raise him to her own level?”
    Was there really good in the man which he, Ralston, was unable to see? Was he too much in love with Dora himself to be just to Smith, he wondered.
    “No, no!” he reiterated vehemently. “No man who would abuse a horse is fit for a good woman to marry. I’m right about him—I know I am. But can I prove it in time to save her?—not for myself, for I guess I’ve no show; but from him?”
    With a heartache which seemed to have become chronic of late, Ralston followed the Indians’ lead up hill and down, through sand coulees and between cut-banks, at a leisurely pace. They seemed in no hurry, nor did they make any apparent effort to conceal themselves. They rode through several herds of cattle, and passed on, drifting gradually toward the creek bottom close to the reservation line, where both Bar C and I. D. cattle came to drink.
    Ralston wondered if they would attempt to stand him off; but his heart was too heavy for the possibility of a coming fight to quicken his pulse to any great extent. He believed that he would be rather glad than otherwise if they should make a stand. The thought that the tedious waiting game which he had played so long might be ended did not elate him. The ambition seemed to have gone out of him. He had little heart in his work, and small interest in the glory resulting from success.
    He thought only of Dora as he lay full length on the ground, plucking disconsolately at spears of bunch-grass within reach, while he waited for the sound of a shot in the creek bottom, or the reappearance of the Indians.
    He had not long to wait before a shot, a bellow, and another shot told him that the time for action had come. He pulled his rifle from its scabbard, and laid it in front of him on his saddle. It was curious, he thought, as he rode closer, that one Indian was not on guard. Still, it was probable that they had grown careless through past successes. He was within a hundred yards of the butchers before they saw him.
    “Hello!” Yellow Bird’s voice was friendly.
    “Hello!” Ralston answered.
    “Fat cow. Fine beef,” vouchsafed the Indian.
    “Fine beef,” agreed Ralston. “Can I help you?”
    The MacDonald brand stood out boldly on the cow’s flank!
    Ralston watched them until they had loaded their meat upon the pack-horses and started homeward. One thing was certain: if Running Rabbit had butchered the Bar C cattle, he had done so under a white man’s supervision. In this instance, with an Indian’s usual economy in the matter of meat, he had left little but the horns and hoofs. The Bar C cattle had been butchered with the white man’s indifference to waste.
    Any one of the bunk-house crowd, except McArthur, Ralston believed to be quite capable of stealing cattle for beef purposes. But if they had been stealing systematically, as it would appear, why had they killed MacDonald cattle to-day? Ralston still regarded the affair of the fresh hide as too suspicious a circumstance to be overlooked, and he meant to learn which of the white grub-liners had been absent. He reasoned that the Indians had a wholesome fear of Colonel Tolman, and that it was unlikely they would venture upon his range for such a purpose without a white man’s moral support.
    Smith had been missing frequently of late and for so long as two days at a time, but this could not be regarded as peculiar, since the habits of all the grub-liners were more or less erratic. They disappeared and reappeared, with no explanation of their absence.
    In his present frame of