“I tell you,” repeated Judith obstinately, “I just don’t let myself think about it.”

“Then what’s made you so cross ever since that night?”

Judith rose and set the brimming milk pail in a feed box.  Her eyes, in the lantern light, widened with a horror so devastating that Douglas clutched the manger behind him.

“How did you know?  Doug, that’s it and there’s no place to go for help because there isn’t any help for that!”

The sudden revelation of her need roused Douglas.  He moistened his lips and said, “We’ve got to harden ourselves to stand it, like the rest of ’em do.  And when it gets too bad we can talk to each other about it.  That’ll help.”

Judith clutched his arm as if she felt the need of touching a human being.  Douglas did not stir but as he stood looking down at her a strange aching gladness at her nearness and at her splendid girlhood flooded the horror out of his thought.

“I’ll carry the milk pail in for you, Jude,” he said.

“Fudge!” she returned scornfully.  “As if I hadn’t carried it in every night for four years!  You’d better do your feeding before Dad gets after you.”

Douglas suddenly laughed and went out.

For a day or so he was haunted, particularly after he went to bed, by the thought of the grave scene and by the comments Grandma Brown had made.  But Doug was only sixteen, after all, and shortly he was absorbed by other matters:  the hunt for Scott Parsons, the preparations for the dehorning, and his new and thrilling and secret feeling toward Judith.

The search for Scott delayed the round-up only for a short time.  A day or so after the funeral it snowed and removed the last chance of finding Scott’s tracks.  The cold was intense, and the job really belonged to Sheriff Frank Day, so the posse broke up after a few days and the dehorning was undertaken.

Early in the morning, half a dozen young riders helped Douglas and Judith to cut out of the great herd in the swamp field the steers in need of dehorning.  In proportion to their strength, Lost Chief girls were as clever as the men in handling horses and cattle.  Judith was easily the best of them.  There was a fire and vim about her work, a wild grace, that the other girls lacked.  Douglas, his vision sharpened by his new attitude toward Judith, thought she never had looked so handsome as she did this morning, in her beaver cap, her new scarlet mackinaw, curls flying, sitting the excited little Swift as easily as a boy.

Out of the circular corral led a smaller one.  A cedar fire burned in the middle of the lesser enclosure.  John Spencer and two helpers stood near the fire, saws at hand, searing-iron heating, tar-pot simmering.  The herd bellowed in the outer corral.  The riders, ropes in hand, sat with laughing faces turned toward Judith, who was to rope the first steer.  Douglas wished that there were not so many of the riders with