The meeting with Nettie on the road doubled the Bull's determination to possess her again The exhilaration of the chance encounter and the frustration of his plans when, returning, he found the little car gone, had roused his desire to a pitch of insanity. Everything else was forgotten; his cattle, his ranches, his great money losses, the impossibility of obtaining help, even the deterioration of his prized bulls at Barstairs—all these cares and anxieties ceased to exist in the overpowering passion that consumed him.

Bull Langdon was incapable of love in its finer sense, but in his blind and brutal way, he was madly in love with Nettie Day. His passion for the girl was like a fire that burned and raged within him, seeking an outlet where there was none and for the time being the man was like a maniac.

He thought of the girl ceaselessly, chortling with delight as he pictured her beauty, now sweeter than ever before in its young maturity. He had not noticed a new quality of spirituality that suffering had added to her loveliness, a certain light that seemed to radiate from her; all he had seen was that the summer's work in the fields had reddened her cheeks and brightened her eyes, and that her lips were like a scarlet flame.

If he pictured Nettie as she had looked at him from her seat in the doctor's Ford with her wide frightened eyes, his mind went back also to those other days, when he had held the girl in his arms. Many a night as he tramped the floor of the empty ranch house, his half-crazed mind lived over and over the joy of those days when he had held her in his power—"like purebred stuff in the Squeezegate." She had been weak and docile then, a timid, terrified captive; but now there was a new expression in her face, a look that was like a shield—a warning guard that held him back and warned him that if trapped again she would struggle to the death. He told himself he had no desire to hurt her—he wanted only to have her back, where he believed she belonged by right; he would make her the second Mrs. Langdon. And at the thought of Nettie, at the Bar Q, reigning in the great ranch house, keeping the place clean and sweet as his first wife had done, the Bull threw out his arms and clinched them to him, as if in fact the struggling girl were actually in their grasp, and he crooned words of savage tenderness to his vision, only to moan and whimper the next moment as he came back to reality again.

His desperation made him resourceful and cunning. He looked for Nettie Day at every farm and ranch in the foothills and in the adjoining prairie country. His car no longer tore along the roads from Bar Q to Barstairs, as he superintended the care of his demoralized herd. He had started now upon another hunt, and was running to earth a quarry whose price he set above all else.

His spying at the Loring ranch had revealed the fact that Nettie was not there, but, laying in wait for the unfortunate Jake, his son of an earlier passion, in due time he captured and tortured the half-breed. He had picked him up on the trail, racing bare-back upon some errand into the hills, and his questions as to the whereabouts of Nettie, accompanied by prods and kicks, had brought the stuttered information that she was "far way off on the hills. She at lumber camp. Everybody gone die on Bow Claire."

That was enough for the Bull. He knew now where the girl was, but the knowledge, instead of satisfying and calming him, did the very reverse when he realized that Nettie and Cyril were once more together. That thought obsessed him, and filled his mind with murderous designs.

In the midst of his fury he reminded himself of Nettie's baby and a new idea, charged with possibilities, occurred to him. If he could not take the girl by force, there was one way by which she could be lured to Bar Q. He was amazed that he had not thought of it before. Human nature, he knew, was no different from cattle nature, where the young ones were concerned. The cattle mother would go, if necessary, through walls of fire and stone to reach her offspring, and what would keep Nettie Day from going to Bar Q, if she knew her baby was there? It was never necessary to throw the lariat upon the mother's neck; the roping of her child was always enough. Bull Langdon swung his car around.