time, when he had looked up into the sky vault from the saddle that was
his pillow, he had known that sense of insignificance.

To-night the thoughts of John Beaudry were somber. He looked over his
past with a strange feeling that he had lived his life and come to the
end of it. He was not yet forty, a well-set, bow-legged man of medium
height, in perfect health, sound as to every organ. From an old war
wound he had got while raiding with Morgan he limped a little. Two
more recent bullet scars marked his body. But none of these interfered
with his activity. He was in the virile prime of life; yet a bell rang
in his heart the warning that he was soon to die. That was why he was
taking his little son out of the country to safety.

He took all the precautions that one could, but he knew that in the end
these would fail him. The Rutherfords would get him. Of that he had
no doubt. They would probably have killed him, anyhow, but he had made
his sentence sure when he had shot Anse Rutherford and wounded Eli
Schaick ten days ago. That it had been done by him in self-defense
made no difference.

Out of the Civil War John Beaudry had come looking only for peace. He
had moved West and been flung into the wild, turbulent life of the
frontier. In the Big Creek country there was no peace for strong men
in the seventies. It was a time and place for rustlers and
horse-thieves to flourish at the expense of honest settlers. They
elected their friends to office and laughed at the law.

But the tide of civilization laps forward. A cattlemen's association
had been formed. Beaudry, active as an organizer, had been chosen its
first president. With all his energy he had fought the rustlers. When