It was a still, cold night. Nettie Day rushed blindly on horseback through the pathless dead timber lands. With amazing presence of mind she had mounted the Bull's own mare, which he had left standing outside the camp. On and on she urged the great animal, heedless of snow-laden brush and boughs that snapped back and lashed her as she rode.

The dense woods lay wrapped in a vast silence. Not a twig stirred on the frost-bowed trees. No living foot seemed to move within the depths of the forest. All that she heard, if indeed she heard anything, as she fled like the wind through the timber land, was the crunch of her horse's hoofs on the frozen snow. On and on, indifferent to the piercing cold; intent on one purpose only, to reach Bar Q and get her baby before the Bull could overtake her.

The mare was built on big, slim lines. Of thoroughbred racing stock by her sire, she was the foal of a Percheron mare, and therefore swift as well as strong. She carried the girl throughout that night without once stopping, all of the twenty miles to the Bar Q.

Dawn was breaking over the still sleeping land, and a great shadowy arch spread like a rainbow across the sky, the long-prayed-for symbol of Chinook weather. Before the day was half gone a wind would blow like a bugle call from the mountains, and, racing with the sun, would send its warm breath over the land. But Nettie Day was blind to the omen of spring. Cramped and cold from her long ride, with a speechless terror tearing at her heartstrings, she fell rather than dismounted from her horse, and staggered toward the house, at the door of which Angella Loring stood, with empty arms.

Meanwhile another kind of drama had taken place in the timber land. Bloody and battered from his fight with the lumber-jacks and loggers, Bull Langdon sought the trail. In those deep woods, so still and silent, with the spell of the night upon them, in spite of the deep silence, there was a feeling of live, wild things hidden in bush and coolie, crouching and peering through the snow-laden brush.

He knew the country well, and had almost as keen a sense of smell as the cattle themselves. He had boasted that he could "sniff his way" anywhere through the foothill country, and that his long years of night riding had given him a cat's eyes. Where the dense forests broke here and there, the clearings were as bright as day in the moonlight.

It was twelve miles to Morley, an Indian trading post on the edge of the Stony Indian Reserve, and the Bull calculated that by turning off the main trail and following an old cattle path, he could cut the distance down a third.

The white moon behind moving clouds lighted his way one moment and plunged him in darkness the next. The cattle trail went in a wavering line toward a valley that ran along the Ghost River, where lay the summer range of the foothill cattle.

If the woods were still and dark, the valley, flooded with moonlight, looked like a great pool on whose farther bank dark forms were vaguely moving. These were the stray cattle that had escaped the fall round-up, and found shelter from the inclement weather in the seclusion of this deep valley, protected by the hills on one side, and the rapidly flowing Ghost on the other.

The first impulse of a cattleman upon spotting stray cattle on the range is to ride close enough to them to read the brand upon their ribs; no easy matter at night, but the Bull was used to this. He was halfway across the valley when a certain restless stirring made him aware that he had been seen. Range cattle will move blindly before a man on a horse, but it is a reckless man who will risk himself near range cattle afoot. The roar of one of the leaders sent the cowman cautiously back into the shelter of the brush. He was unprepared to meet a stampede, but he marked the place to which the cattle had strayed, and made a mental note to round them up in a few days.

He was now but four miles from Morley, still traveling along the edges of the woods, when suddenly a low moaning call, growing ever in volume and power, until it swelled into a mighty roar that shook the bristling branches of the trees, smote the still night, and reverberated in the surrounding hills.

The cattleman stood stock-still, his head lifted and his face strained upward, his ears alert to catch the sound again. For he well knew that great far-reaching bellow which had once swelled his breast with pride; it was the furious challenge of the champion bull. Somewhere, close at hand, but hidden in those dense woods, Prince Perfection Bar Q the IV was at large.

The sound was not repeated and Bull Langdon came at last out of the sheltering woods. A wide field that flanked on one side the Banff Highway lay before him, on the other side of which were the fenced lands of the Indian Reserve.

As he moved through the thick woods, pausing every now and then to listen for treading hoofs behind him or for a breath of that low, menacing murmur that preceded the terrible roar, the cattleman's overwrought fancy had pictured the bull upon his trail, nor was it premonition that held him, but the fearful certainty that the savage animal was following close upon his tracks.

Bull Langdon considered the open space of the field and reckoned up his chances of making a swift dash across to the road, and across the road to the line of Indian fencing. A certain safety from his pursuer. For an instant he hesitated, then with lowered head, like one of his own blindly driven cattle, the cowman sped across the field. Not, however, swiftly enough for the Hereford bull that had trailed him.

On the edge of the timber land, Prince Perfection Bar Q the IV stood in a proud and questioning attitude with his stern eyes fixed upon the moving speck before him. Slowly he marked his prey, then his head dropped, and with a lumbering gait, yet incredibly swift, he made straight for his quarry. The cowman, his back to the oncoming bull, intent only on reaching the shelter of the barbed wire fences on the south side of the Banff Highway before it was too late, did not dare look round, as like a missile released from a colossal catapult the great bull shot across the field. Sideways and still on the run, with his lowered head swinging from side to side, he drove his horns clear through the cowman's ribs. There was a horrible rending sound, and suddenly Bull Langdon was tossed into the air to fall to earth like a stone. Again and again the savage bull gored and tossed him until he was rent into pieces.

A master vengeance was in that act of justice, though no torture of Bull Langdon's body could atone for the torture he had inflicted upon Nettie Day's soul.