"I'm after Ogilvie," he shouted, and was gone with the slam of the door.
Wrath at the thought that he might be foiled in this special work of his hurried him out where the wind caught him with its full blast across the hills, stinging his face with hard snow. He drove against it with his head low; cut across a side-trail to the shack in the cotton-woods which Ogilvie shared with Hotchkiss; found it empty, and battled back to Grange's, where Jimmy was settling the bar for the night.
"Seen Ogilvie?" he gasped, and reeled in the sudden calm that loosed his sinews after the buffeting.
"Gee!" said Jimmy, and suspended his operations. "What's doing? Murder or suicide?"
"Be easy. You're not accused yet." The temper in Dick woke at the clink of the bottles. "Give me a whiskey straight," he ordered. "Seen Ogilvie?"
"Sure. He was around right after supper"
"He was at the barracks since then. Where now? Hit her up."
"My," said Jimmy admiringly. "You sure are a hustler." He leaned on the counter and reflected. "He's likely in the back parlour with Andree," he said. "He's crazy for her. Eh? Well-l-l; I guess! Or maybe he's met the doctor some place an' is standin' under shelter tryin' ter git enough English out of him to know if what he's got the matter wi' him is a stomach-ache or heart-disease. But I guess he's jes' sleepin' it off some place. Oh, I tell you; he's sure over to the English Mission. He's been along there three times since doc. told him he was a-dyin' man. But I imagine he ain't wuth findin'. He is the biggest toad in the puddle, anyway."
Having quartered Ogilvie to his satisfaction he fell to work again. Dick glanced into the back-parlour. Then he went on, with the wind screaming in the tortured branches that whipped the bare poles, and the whiskey and the hot blood rising in him to fight the bitter cold.
In the lonely forest-trail near the Mission he saw something dark swerve aside from the snow-line and crouch in the trees. He sprang at it as the tuft-eared lynx
