Seaforth returned by the time the horse was saddled, with an envelope, and Alton, who took it, rode out at a gallop, for it was a long way to the settlement, and the evenings at the ranch had of late become very pleasant to him.  He did not wish to lose a minute of one of them.  He drew bridle, however, when he came up with two men standing in the narrow trail, one of whom signed to him.  He was a small rancher, but it was not until the impatient horse plunged that Alton recognized the other, who moved aside, as the man he had thrown into the river.  The rancher saw the glance that passed between them.

“Hallo!” he said.  “Then you two had trouble when you split?  Now, Damer was telling me he’d got kind of tired of saw milling.”

Alton laughed.  “That’s quite likely,” he said.  “He showed it by breaking up my planer in a fit of temper, and I fired him.”

Then he touched the horse with his heel, and Damer’s gaze grew venomous as he watched him ride away down the shadowy trail.  The rancher evidently noticed it.

“Now I begin to understand how you got your jacket tore up and that lump on your forehead,” he said.  “I wasn’t quite sure about your tale, anyway, and if Harry fired you it was for something mean.  You’ll get no horse from me.”

The other man said nothing as he turned away, but his face was not pleasant as he plodded down the trail, and those words of Alton’s were to cost him dear, for if Damer had obtained the horse he wanted to carry him to the railroad he would in all probability have left the country, which would have prevented a good deal of trouble.  As it was, however, he restrapped the roll of blankets on his back, and trudged on with bitterness in his heart under the heat of the afternoon.  He had when he left the Somasco mill headed in the direction of the Tyee mine, and passed the night in the woods; but with the morning reflection came, and he had doubled on his trail and was then making for the railroad, stiff with fatigue.  Each time he stumbled into a rut and the jolt shook him he remembered his last grievance against Alton, who had sent him on foot, and his frame of mind was not an enviable one when he limped into sight of the settlement as dusk was closing down.

He had made a long journey that day, and a good deal depended on the fact that he was weary and his boots galled him, because it had been his intention to push on to a ranch beyond the settlement before he slept, and hire a horse there.  Damer was not especially sensitive, but he felt no great desire to encounter the badinage of the men generally to be found about the store, who, he surmised, would have heard by this time what had happened at the Somasco mill.  Still, he was hungry and weary, and stopped a moment when he caught a blink of light between the trees.  The bush behind him was very black and still, the dampness of the dew was on his dusty garments, and he shivered a little in the faint cold breeze that came down from the snow.  Then more lights twinkled into brightness, a cheerful murmur of voices and a burst of laughter came out of the shadows, and the glow that broke out from the windows of Horton’s store seemed curiously inviting.  Damer, however, dallied still, and fumbled for his tobacco.  He would sit down where he was and smoke, he said, and then attempt that last toilsome league.