It rained hard all night and by morning the brook had become a yellow flood and the trail was under water.  Toward noon the rain turned to a drizzly snow, and finally ceased.  Slingerland passed on down the valley, searching for tracks.  The ground everywhere had been washed clean and smooth.  When he reached the old St. Vrain and Laramie Trail it looked as though a horse had not passed there in months.  He spent another wretched night, and next day awoke to the necessities of life.  Except for his rifle, and his horses, and a few traps back up in the hills, he had nothing to show for years of hard and successful work.  But that did not matter.  He had begun with as little and he could begin again.  He killed meat, satisfied his hunger, and cooked more that he might carry with him.  Then he spent two more days in that locality, until he had crossed every outlet from his valley.  Not striking a track, he saw nothing but defeat.

That moment was bitter.  “If Neale’d happen along hyar now he’d kill me—­an’ sarve me right,” muttered the trapper.

But he believed that Neale, too, had gone the way of so many who had braved these wilds.  Slingerland saw in the fate of Neale and Allie the result of civilization marching westward.  If before he had disliked the idea of the railroad entering his wild domain, he hated it now.  Before that survey the Indians had been peaceful; no dangerous men rode the trails.  What right had the Government to steal land from the Indians, to break treaties, to run a steam track across the plains and mountains?  Slingerland foresaw the bloodiest period ever known in the West, before that work should be completed.  It had struck him deep—­this white-man movement across the Wyoming hills, and it was not the loss of all he had worked for that he minded.  For years his life had been lonely, and then suddenly it had been full.  Never again would it be either.

Slingerland turned his back to the trail made by the advancing march of the empire-builders, and sought the seclusion of the more inaccessible hills.

“Some day I’ll work out with a load of pelts,” he said, “an’ then mebbe I’ll hyar what become of Neale—­an’ her.”

He found, as one of his kind knew how to find, the valleys where no white man had trod—­where the game abounded and was tame—­where if the red man came he was friendly—­where the silent days and lonely nights slowly made more bearable his memory of Allie Lee.

12

Allie Lee possessed a mind at once active and contemplative.  While she dreamed of Neale and their future she busied herself with many tasks, and a whole year flew by without a lagging or melancholy hour.

Neale, she believed, had been detained or sent back to Omaha, or given more important work than formerly.  She divined Slingerland’s doubt, but she would not give it room in her consciousness.  Her heart told her that all was well with Neale, and that sooner or later he would return to her.