They rode to the draw. June gave a small cry of distress.

"Oh, Bob, it's a man."

He dismounted. The horse with the dragging load backed away, but it was too tired to show much energy. Bob moved forward, soothing the animal with gentle sounds. He went slowly, with no sudden gestures. Presently he was patting the neck of the horse. With his hunting-knife he cut the rawhide thongs that served as a harness.

"It's a Ute pony," he said, after he had looked it over carefully. He knew this because the Indians earmarked their mounts.

June was still in the saddle. Some instinct warned her not to look too closely at the load behind that was so horribly twisted.

"Better go back to the road, June," her husband advised. "It's too late to do anything for this poor fellow."

She did as he said, without another look at the broken body.

When she had gone, Bob went close and turned over the huddled figure.

Torn though it was, he recognized the face of Jake Houck. To construct the main features of the tragedy was not difficult.

While escaping from Bear Cat after the fiasco of the bank robbery, Houck must have stumbled somehow into the hands of the Ute band still at large.

They had passed judgment on him and executed it. No doubt the wretched man had been tied at the heels of a horse which had been lashed into a frenzied gallop by the Indians in its rear. He had been dragged or kicked to death by the frightened horse.

As Bob looked down into that still, disfigured face, there came to him vividly a sense of the weakness and frailty of human nature. Not long since this bit of lifeless clay had straddled his world like a Colossus.

To the young cowpuncher he had been a superman, terrible in his power and capacity to do harm. Now all that vanity and egoism had vanished, blown away as though it had never been.

Where was Jake Houck? What had become of him? The shell that had been his was here. But where was the roaring bully that had shaken his fist blasphemously at God and man?

It came to him, with a queer tug at the heartstrings, that Houck had once been a dimpled baby in a mother's arms, a chirruping little fat-legged fellow who tottered across the floor to her with outstretched fingers.

Had that innocent child disappeared forever? Or in that other world to which Jake had so violently gone would he meet again the better self his evil life had smothered?

Bob loosened the bandanna from his throat and with it covered the face of the outlaw. He straightened the body and folded the hands across the breast. It was not in his power to obliterate from the face the look of ghastly, rigid terror stamped on it during the last terrible moments.

The young husband went back to his waiting wife. He stood by her stirrup while she looked down at him, white-faced.

"Who was it?" she whispered.

"Jake Houck," he told her gravely. "The Utes did it--because he killed Black Arrow, I reckon."

She shuddered. A cloud had come over the beautiful world.

"We'll go on now," he said gently. "I'll come back later with your father."

They rode in silence up the long hill. At the top of it he drew rein and smiled at his bride.

"You'll not let that spoil the day, will you, June? He had it coming, you know. Houck had gone bad. If it hadn't been the Utes, it would have been the law a little later."

"Yes, but--" She tried to answer his smile, not very successfully. "It's rather--awful, isn't it?"

He nodded. "Let's walk over to the cabin, dear."

She swung down, into his arms. There she found comfort that dissipated the cloud from her mind. When she ran into the house to throw her arms around Pete Tolliver's neck, she was again radiant.

"Guess! Guess what!" she ordered her father.

Pete looked at his daughter and at the bashful, smiling boy.

"I reckon I done guessed, honeybug," he answered, stroking her rebellious hair.

"You're to come and live with us. Isn't he, Bob?"

The young husband nodded sheepishly. He felt that it was a brutal thing to take a daughter from her father. It had not occurred to him before, but old Pete would feel rather out of it now.

Tolliver looked at Bob over the shoulder of his daughter.

"You be good to her or I'll--" His voice broke.

"I sure will," the husband promised.

June laughed. "He's the one ought to worry, Dad. I'm the flyaway on this team."

Bob looked at her, gifts in his eyes. "I'm worryin' a heap," he said, smiling.

THE END