the next day's move, at least, was clearly defined in his mind and he felt
sure that he could do no better by going another route.

These lonely rides gave him over to the clutch of thoughts he had never
before harbored in his sunny nature. Grim, ugly thoughts they were, and not
nice to remember afterward. They swung persistently around a central
subject, as the earth revolves around the sun; and, like the earth, they
turned and turned on the axis of his love for a woman.

In particularly ugly moods he thought that if Harry Conroy were caught and
convicted of horsestealing, Jessie must perforce admit his guilt and general
unworthiness--Rowdy called it general cussedness--and Rowdy be vindicated in
her eyes. Then she would marry him, and go with him to the Red Deer country
and--air-castles for miles! When he awoke to the argument again, he would
tell himself savagely that if he could, by any means, bring
about Conroy's speedy conviction, he would do so."

This was unlike Rowdy, whose generous charity toward his enemies came near
being a fault. He might feel any amount of resentment for wrong done, but
cold-blooded revenge was not in him; that he had suffered so much at
Conroy's hands was due largely to the fact that Conroy was astute enough to
read Rowdy aright, and unscrupulous enough to take advantage. Add to that a
smallminded jealousy of Rowdy's popularity and horsemanship, one can easily
imagine him doing some rather nasty things. Perhaps the meanest, and the one
which rankled most in Rowdy's memory, was the cutting of Rowdy's latigo just
before a riding contest, in which the purse and the glory of a
championship-belt seemed in danger of going to Rowdy.

Rowdy had got a fall that crippled him for weeks, and Harry had won the
purse and belt--and the enmity of several men better than he. For though