Thus time passed and another year slid around. Alice Page was gone, teaching in a girls' residential small college on the coast. The ranch was beginning to respond to the hard work. Stock on the range was increasing in numbers and value. More settlers were coming in, and land which had been a drug on the market was beginning to find purchasers.
Angus had grown into a young man, tall and lean, quite unstiffened by his hard work. Turkey was a youth, slimmer of build and smaller of bone than his brother, but wiry and hard and catlike in quickness. Jean had grown from a slip of a girl into a slender, brown-eyed maid. She was through with the local school, and though she never hinted at it, Angus knew quite well that she desired to attend the college where Alice Page taught. It was characteristic of him that he said nothing until he could speak definitely. But one night he told her she had better get ready to go. Jean was startled.
"How on earth did you know I was thinking of that?"
"It didn't need the second sight of old Murdoch McGillivray," her brother returned. "You had better get such things as you want."
"But—can you afford it?" she asked doubtfully.
"Yes. You write to Alice to-night."
So in the early fall Jean went away, and her brothers missed her very much; Turkey, because he had now to mend his own clothes and take a turn at the cooking, and Angus because he had confided in her more than in anybody else.
When the fall grew late and the snow near, Rennie rode the range for stock, which was usually split up into small bands, scattered here and there in valleys and pockets along the base of the hills. Each bunch had its own territory, from which it seldom strayed unless feed got short. Therefore any given lot could usually be found by combing a few square miles. Before the heavy snows these bunches were rounded up and driven to the ranch to winter there. But this time Rennie could find no trace at all of one bunch.
"It's them three-year-old steers," he said, "that used in between Cat Creek and the mountain. They sure ain't on the range."
"They must have drifted off. Maybe the feed got short."