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 lander, none of them could say. Pap said he'd go on up to the square and find out, but he thought Windy Moore had got something crossways in him. Mrs. Cowgill sought to restrain her son, who put her hand away with scorn.

Windy Moore was a good while about getting his gun. Pap was half way to the square, where the rider had disappeared, when Windy came down the stairs with a sideways trip to him that was very neat and elegant.

"Where's he at?" Windy asked, gun in hand, caution restraining him in any headlong dash.

"Gone around the corner," said Goosie, pointing.

"He'll go around, another one!" said Windy, a big threat in his voice. He followed Pap, still with a cautious casting around him, an unaccountable deliberation in his pace for an avenger going out with his bulldog in his hip pocket, looking for a man to slay.

Mrs. Cowgill lifted her hands again, opened her mouth and her eyes in repetition of her former silent surrendering up of every emotion of surprise, turned and hurried back to her dining-room to see if the new girl had put on the pickles.

Goosie remained outside a little while, looking up the street, listening, to see and hear if anything broke loose. There was no excitement in town. If the cow jerry had passed, he had gone by unrecognized by anybody but Windy Moore. Goosie believed Windy had been mistaken, having rather a low regard for his reliability at the best.

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 Cow jerry, or plain cowhand as the rider might prove to be, the hungry railroaders would break across the yards in a few minutes, coming like a flock of chickens when they hear the dishpan on the fence. Dinner must be laid out on the long table, let even Gabriel come riding his white horse up the main street of McPacken.

Crowley, the bank cashier, felt a skittishness come over him every time he saw a big hat come in the door. Yet a man could not very well greet every wearer of a big hat with a gun presented between the bars of the cage, in a country where some of the biggest hats had the biggest accounts. A man had to sweat it out and run his chances. Crowley got the jump of his life as he was arranging things in his cage after the morning rush of business that day.

He had turned to look at the clock—it was ten minutes to twelve—and did not see the man enter the door, which stood open to the breeze, a brick holding it back against the wall. The fellow was half way between the door and Cashier Crowley's window when first seen, coming in softly, as if he walked on his toes. Crowley did not hesitate. He grabbed his gun and leveled it between the shining brass bars.

It was not an unknown face under the big white hat; a good-humored, round, ruddy young face, but with a certain weariness and strain in it, especially around the frank blue eyes. A growth of virile sandy beard, several days old, added a comical roughness to the otherwise ingenuous face. The cashier knew it was not a strange face, but he could not remember where

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 he had seen it before, nor call up a name to fit it. But he didn't like that silent tip-toeing across the floor. It wasn't his day to take another chance.

The visitor did not appear at all impressed by the cashier's gun, nor the desperate look in the man's scared white face. He held up one hand in a gesture of indulgent admonition, grinning a little, the disturbance in his dusty whisker stubs running up to his eyes, making them seem to laugh. The young man was carrying a grain sack, about half full of some lumpy matter; the horse that had brought him there stood before the door.

The president was sitting in his little railed-off place beside the cashier's cage, perplexities marshalled before him in long lines of figures, and short groups of fat figures, showing sums in addition and subtraction. There was plenty for the president of a bank that had stood a loss of over forty thousand dollars, cash, to think about in a town like McPacken, where the directors were not any too brisk about coming up with an assessment to cover it.

There was a little tin sign with gilt letters tacked on the gate opening into the president's pen, labelling him as neatly as a jar of jam. The man with the grain sack on his shoulder turned from the cashier's hostile embrasure as he read this word PRESIDENT. He turned his back to the cashier's gun with the nonchalance or ignorance of innocence.

That moment the cashier called a sharp warning to his superior, who raised his weary head, and sprang to his feet like a man aroused to flee for his life. He stood

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 with hand on the pistol that lay on the flat desk before him, seeming to wait his moment, rather than to rush to meet it. He—was a different sort of man from the one in the cage; a man who would not lift his weapon until he was ready to shoot. So the visitor with the sack on his shoulder said to himself, feeling a warm admiration for the lean, harassed-looking president of the bank.

"What do you want?" the president demanded, as the young man, a stranger to him, approached the rail.

"I just want to turn this money over to you," the stranger replied wearily, as if worn by a thankless vigil over something in which he claimed no share.

"Money? Whose money? What money?"

"That's one of them! That's one of them!" the cashier warned. He came out of his cage, gun in hand.

"Put up that gun, Crowley!" the president ordered, his command sharp as a blow 'in the cashier's broad flat face.

"They forced me to assist them that morning, sir," the young man said, his voice low in what seemed a shameful confession, the blood of humiliation rising in high tide to his face.

"I see," said the president, but, far from seeing, puzzled to-get the drift of this extraordinary young man's words.

"It's one of that gang!" the cashier whispered, hold—ing his gun ready to use at the first wink.

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 "Oh, I see," the president repeated, really beginning to see.

"They got the swing on me and took my gun away from me while I was standin' there cashin' two little checks," the stranger went on. "The amount was a hundred and ten dollars. When you come to it, just lay it to one side for me, please sir."

The visitor put his sack on the rail near the president's hand, and turned to go his way in the manner of a man whose task was finished.

"You must be Tom Laylander?" said the president, opening the little gate, his hand extended to check the stranger's going.

Tom Laylander stopped, turned again in dignity, his weary body drawn up to the last fraction of an inch that it would stretch.

"Sir, that is my name," he replied.

"Wait a second," the bank official requested, with a little gesture of attention toward the door.

Tom had not noticed before that the beginning of a crowd had collected in front of the bank. He saw Pap Cowgill there, close by the open door, and a man with a badge on his vest, and Windy Moore coming pushing among the others, who seemed to be blowing there like leaves on a sudden gust of wind. Windy had his hand on his hip pocket; he was puffing as if he had run a mile. Tom understood the president's gesture. It seemed to say: "I believe you, but they want to see the proof before you leave."

The president had taken his knife from his pocket,

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 the sack from the rail, as cool and steady as if about to open a sack of wheat. He cut the string, carried the sack to the middle of the floor and emptied it, full in the sight of such of McPacken as had assembled there, and were coming every second as fast as their shanks could carry them.

"By cripes! There's my watch!" said Windy Moore.

A heap of money, such as few in the crowd ever had seen before, lay on the bank floor. There were bundles of currency, loose bills of currency flooding them like the sauce of some delectable pudding; several little bags which everybody knew contained gold, a few gleams of white where silver dollars had got mixed in the hasty harvest.

The president stood looking at the heap of money, the empty sack in his hand, his head bent as if overwhelmed by some emotion that he dared not allow the world to see in a bank official's face.

"I think it's all there," said Tom, turning again to go.

"How in God Almighty's world did you do it, Laylander?" the banker asked, wonder so great in him that it was almost awe.

"You'll excuse me for hurryin' off," said Tom, that painful flood of crimson in his face again, "but I think this is the day I've got a case comin' up in court."

The crowd was flooding into the bank, filling the room, gorging the door. The new city marshal, the butt-end of a billiard cue in his hand, pistol by his side, appeared to think this was the proper moment for him to push into the bank and take a hand. Windy Moore

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 and others had been giving him an earful as they stood outside. Following the custom in filling the office of city marshal, the job had been given by the mayor to the next most worthless citizen in town. This fellow was a barber. He had a soapy, sloppy shop next door to the county jail.

This officious person now planted himself in front of Laylander, barring his way to the door, hand laid tohis gun.

"You want me to take him up?" he asked the banker.

"Let that man pass!" the banker ordered, something more than authority in his tone.

The city marshal subsided; others drew out of the way. Tom Laylander, his own pistol again in the leather against his leg, hurried out to the court house to see about his case.

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OUISE GARDNER had asked the clerk of the court to send word to her in the county treasurer's office when Laylander's case came up for hearing. She understood that his counsel had withdrawn, in the light of Tom's apparent complicity in the bank robbery, leaving him undefended against Cal Withers's claim. She had come to the decision, after giving it much thought, to make a plea of continuance for Laylander, a bold intention which she kept to herself. For she believed that Tom would come back.

Whether through oversight or indifference, the clerk did not send for Louise. When she left her work with Maud Kelly at noon, they stopped at the court room to make inquiry about the case. It was in progress that moment, Withers's lawyer on his feet making an argument for judgment, against which the judge seemed to be standing out stubbornly, as his low, precise denials of the points raised expressed.

Louise told Maud that she intended to stop there and hear the end of it. Maud, always savagely hungry, and little interested in Tom Laylander's loss or gain, went

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 on to lunch, while Louise slipped into the court room and down to the front, where she sat, far more conspicuously than she desired, among the empty benches.

It was not an interesting case; everybody in McPacken knew, or believed they knew, how it would end from the first. Besides, it takes something more than a civil suit, even involving a supposed fugitive from justice, to hold people when dinner is ready.

"But that is not the point, Mr. McSweeny," said the judge, patient in the repetition of a thing the wilful attorney was determined to have his way, justice or injustice, law or no law. "You have not made your case, you cannot make your case, without the essential evidence."

"We are unable to produce it, as your honor knows," the attorney returned pettishly. "If we had the note, we certainly would introduce it. We're not holding it out just to give us a chance to stand up here and talk."

"You haven't introduced any evidence, except the testimony of the plaintiff, to prove that the note ever was in existence," said the court.

"It was our opinion that the testimony of a man of my client's standing in this community would be sufficient," the lawyer returned, bitterly sarcastic.

"The court regrets to say that it is not."

"We can summon witnesses to prove the existence of this note, and that it is lost beyond the power of mortal man to produce."

"You should have done so," said the court.

"This defendant, Laylander, is a fugitive from jus-

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 tice. He never had any standing in this community, he wouldn't have any standing in this court if he was here. It is preposterous of your honor, if you will permit me to say so—"

"It seems you have said it without permission, Mr. McSweeny," spaid the court, undisturbed.

"To ask us to produce proof of the existence of this note."

"It is quite reasonable, Mr. McSweeny," the court corrected him, with some show of rising temper. "The note itself is the essential evidence in an action of this character."

"It is a fact just as well established, your honor, that the loss of a note does not release the maker of it from payment."

"That is very true. All the court requires is proof, in the absence of the essential document itself, that such: a note existed; that it was a valid note at the time this action was brought. The court will give you—three days, Mr. McSweeny, to produce such evidence. I make the time short on account of the heavy expense accruing against the attached property. Will that be long enough for you?"

Here the judge looked across the bench with a frown, displeased by the sudden invasion of his quiet room by what seemed a holiday crowd of people, male and female. The city marshal was among them, the president of the bank was there. Maud Kelly had been caught in the sudden current and carried back.

The case of Withers against Laylander seemed to

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 have assumed a sudden importance in the public regard. It was as if the gate of a pasture had been opened, letting out a herd of famished cattle to water. The judge withheld the proceedings while the benches filled speedily with excited, whispering people. The attorney for the plaintiff stood with a frown of annoyance on his face.

"Mr. Sheriff," said the judge, looking around for that dignitary, "Mr. Sheriff,"—a little louder—"let us have quiet."

The sheriff had been dozing at a table near the clerk, his long body slid downward in his chair to bring his head to easy rest on the back of it, his long legs under the table. He came up like a man from a dive, amazement, bewilderment, in his simple face. He rose, rapping the table with his fist. He did not call for order; just looked around with a threat that seemed to command it, and sat down again, well satisfied with himself and the result.

"If your honor please," said a soft, deferential voice up the aisle about midway of the room.

"What is it?" asked the judge, very severe, very much displeased.

The speaker advanced toward the bench, walking on tiptoes, hat under his arm, a big pistol flapping against his thigh. The sheriff rose, leaning forward with hands on the table, the color running out of his face. He was in the aisle with a bound, confronting Tom Laylander, gun thrown down on him, desperate intention in his face.

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 "Put 'em up!" he commanded.

Laylander raised his hands, dropping his hat. The sheriff leaned far, and drew Tom's pistol out of the holster, breathing easier when he had it clear. He edged around behind Tom, indicating that he was to advance toward the amazed judge.

"Your honor, this is that feller Laylander," the sheriff explained.

People in the room made a stirring among the benches, some of them rising from crouching behind them, standing now, stretching to see.

"We must have order here!" the judge commanded.

Louise started forward as if to protest against this outrageous action on the sheriff's part, as she felt it to be. She did not know where Tom Laylander had been, or what perils he had passed, but the look of weariness in his face told her that it had been far, his dangers many and grave. Her heart seemed to rise and exult for him, walking in the boldness of innocence among those who had accused and slandered him.

She remained standing, unaware of her conspicuous situation, until she saw that attention was being divided between her and the sheriff's prisoner. She believed Tom had not seen her when he passed down the aisle, yet hoped that he had. She wanted him to know that in the face of public distrust and hostility as expressed by Withers's lawyer and the sheriff's action, one in McPacken believed in him and held his interest at heart.

Cal Withers was whispering to his attorney, who leaned over the table to hear. The cowman's spirit

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 seemed uneasy within him; he threw his hand to the place where his gun usually hung, feeling stripped and exposed to the danger of sudden death when he thought of the weapon outside in the sheriff's office. The judge indicated by a movement of his hand that the sheriff was to stand aside.

"You started to address the court; is there something you want to say? Are you Thomas Laylander, defendant in the case now being heard?"

"Yes sir, your honor, I am. I didn't know it was an offense to come into court with a gun on me—I didn't even remember I had it," said Tom, unable to account for his reception in any other way.

"I guess you can put that pistol down, Mr. Sheriff," the judge suggested, rather than ordered.

"I was some distance away," Tom explained. "I got here as soon as I could."

Judson Weaver, president of the bank, came down the aisle, stopped at the sacred little enclosure in which the attorneys' tables stood, standing as if he had something that he desired to say. The court did not appear to notice him, due, perhaps, to the swirl of surprising conjectures revolving on this defendant's remarkable and unlooked for appearance.

"Your attorney has withdrawn from the case," said the judge. "He turned over your retainer to the clerk of this court, who holds it at your order."

"I guess maybe I can get along without a lawyer of that kind, and be better off," said Tom.

"Your case," said the judge, cold and stern, "is at

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 this point: The plaintiff is unable to produce the note upon which the action for recovery rests. As you perhaps understand, the note itself is the best evidence in such an action, but judgment may be allowed on the presentation of evidence to establish the existence of such note, and proof of its validity at the time the suit was instituted. The court has granted the plaintiff three days' time to gather and present such evidence. There the matter for the present rests."

"Yes sir, your honor. I came in just when this lawyer was argin', makin' mention of me in a slanderous way I'll have to call on him to explain. I understood from your reply to that rascal, sir, that the note was lost. I wanted to speak to the court, sir, to state that I've got the note, right here, your honor, sir. There's no use delayin' the case on account of the note bein' missin'. Here it is."

Tom handed the note to the astounded judge. The equally astonished crowd rustled and shifted, creaking the benches in the strain of bringing eyes and ears a few inches closer to the scene of these remarkable proceedings. Louise sprang up, tense, surging hot with protest against Tom's apparent folly in thus surrendering himself into his enemies' hands. Withers's lawyer was up, hand flung out in protesting gesture.

"If that is the note, and it may well be our note, this—this—person having had access to it lately, we protest against alterations and erasures, cancellations or other marks whatever, that would tend to show payment."

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 "There are no marks on it, Mr. McSweeny, except some notations on the back which may indicate interest payments," said the judge.

The judge sat holding the note before him, looking curiously at Tom Laylander, who had gone back to take his hat from a man and thank him for picking it up. Presently he passed the note, abstractedly, without following the act with his eyes, to Withers's lawyer. Those two immediately went into conference over it, whispering, passing it from hand to hand. Satisfaction settled into their countenances with the quieting of their fears.

Louise sat down again, throbbing and indignant, half scornful of Laylander in spite of her admiration. Why had he been so foolish? Why had he given the note to them? Or perhaps not so foolish, after all. This thought came up to plead for Tom, out of her deep knowledge of his worthiness. Maybe the note was valueless; perhaps it was all the evidence Tom needed to win his case. Withers's lawyer was standing again, the note in his hand.

"Since the defendant is in court, and the note is in evidence, with notations of interest payments by my client, showing that interest was paid on it within the past five years, establishing its validity beyond any and all question; since all these matters and facts are before the court, we ask that the case proceed. Mr. Withers will resume the stand and make formal identification of this note."

"Court is adjourned till two o'clock," said the judge,

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 passing over the lawyer as if he was not, never had been nor ever was expected to be.

The sheriff didn't know just what his own next move was to be in the case of Laylander. He was trying to get the prosecuting attorney's eye, with a view to a warrant. The judge came down from the bench, Banker Weaver went forward to meet him. The crowd pressed Louise along the aisle to the lawyers' enclosure, space sacred no longer to only licensed feet.

"How is this, Laylander? How did you come to have possession of that note?" the judge asked, now in his capacity of perplexed citizen, a state none the less vexing than that of perplexed judge.

"It was among some papers thrown away by the scoundrels that held us up here the other day, sir."

"I see," said the judge. You'vejudge. "You've [sic] been following that gang of bank robbers, have you? You're the man that's been picking them off along the road. I see."

Tom said nothing. He stood hanging his head as if he had been rebuked, his fair hair rumpled, dust gray in his stubble of beard, confusion over him. Louise stood behind him, a yearning in her to call his name, to give him her hands, to say something endearing that would have been incongruously out of place, and made the crowd laugh.

Judson Weaver told the judge of Tom's arrival at the bank with the money. He spared nothing of the obligation that he, and his institution, stood under to Tom Laylander. It was an obligation, he said, that every man in McPacken shared.

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 The judge listened to the story with growing amazement. The sheriff stood leaning his hands on the table, looking like a giraffe with its feet on a rock, his long neck stretched, his eyes crowded out by the wonder that was so big inside of him that atmospheric pressure seemed insufficient to prevent him from bursting on the spot. He was the most astonished sheriff that ever lived.

"He took the guns off of the one that fell in front of the bank, hopped his horse and rode after them, all so quick we thought he was one of the gang," the banker said.

Tom looked up quickly. Louise strained a little nearer, leaning as if to compel him to feel her presence there.

"There was just a rifle, sir," Tom corrected the banker. "It's down there with his horse. It's a slow horse, sir, but it's an endurin' one."

"It was a remarkable thing for one man to strike out after that gang alone and come back alive," the judge marvelled. "Why didn't you wait for the rest?"

"I was so mortified over them takin' my gun away from me and makin' me help pick up the money I couldn't hardly see,' said Tom. His tone and manner seemed an apology to the sheriff, and everybody in McPacken, for rushing off that way ahead of the posse.

"How he got the money away from them before they split it and scattered, how he ever came back at all, God only knows!" the banker said.

"You've been a pretty badly slandered man in this

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 community, Tom Laylander," the judge said. "There wasn't a soul in this town with brains enough to understand."

"I think there was one—or two," said Tom, attaching the amendment as if to divide public conjecture, it seemed.

Tom spoke softly, as if a deep, a dear and cherished thought had taken wings and escaped out of his mouth in words that he had not meant McPacken to hear. He turned his head a little, with a quick, searching movement, and there was Louise. There was Louise, just at his shoulder, all looking out of her eyes that her tongue could not frame one little word to say.

"Yes," said the wise judge, turning away to leave them a little more alone, "there was one."

Tom was holding her hands, having trouble to force asmile, seeing her twitching lips, the stricken whiteness of her face, the joyful admiration of her eyes, her pride so great that it struggled in her bosom with the constraint of pain.

"Why, Miss Louise!" said Tom. "Why, lambie! Don't you cry!"

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T was honesty, but a foolish piece of honesty. That was what McPacken said. It cost Tom Laylander his case. If he had burned that note when he found it beside the bandits' campfire along with other discarded notes, bonds and papers, he'd have won back his cattle. Any sensible man would have burned it, said the public of McPacken. There was such a thing as carrying this honesty game too far.

There was nothing for the judge to do, under the law, but decide the case against Tom. There was the note in evidence, notations on the back of it in indelible pencil made by the hand of Cal Withers, recording payment of interest within five years, thus keeping it from becoming invalid by limitation. The judgment was entered accordingly, and the herd ordered sold at public auction by the sheriff.

Withers's lawyer passed Tom as he was leaving the courtroom in a slow, dazed way. The lawyer carried books under his arm, as lawyers of his calibre always do. He looked at Laylander with a sort of baffled

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 curiosity, glowing with pride in his good fee and easy victory.

"Why didn't you tear that note up, Laylander?" he asked loudly. "Then you'd 'a' had us."

"No gentleman would have thought of it, sir," Tom replied, with dignity and severity alike lost on a conscience that never had been big enough to give its owner any trouble.

Louise was not in court to hear the case go against Tom, it being a Saturday afternoon, with many ranchers in to pay their taxes. Besides, it was Maud Kelly's last day in the office. She was closing up her affairs preparatory to taking her two weeks' vacation, at the end of which time Louise was to succeed her. Tom was rather glad than sorry that she had not been present to witness his defeat. He returned to the hotel with a smile for Mrs. Cowgill on the bench beside her door, the void of his great disappointment and loss hidden under his cougar-skin vest.

"Well, Tom, did you beat him?" Mrs. Cowgill inquired, lively interest in her thin face.

"No ma'am, I didn't beat him yet."

Tom stopped before her, hat off in his respectful way that Mrs. Cowgill admired sa greatly, and prized all the more highly when she was the object of it, so few marks of deference falling in her barren life.

"Didn't the judge decide it yet?"

"Yes, he decided it, ma'am. Colonel Withers won this throw. The judge ordered the sheriff to put my herd up for sale at public auction ten days from today."

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 Mrs. Cowgill looked at Tom with consternation making her gaunt eyes wide. It appeared as if he had brought her news of a personal loss, her perturbation and concern so far outweighed any outward indication of his own.

"Can't you stop them? 'Are you goin' to let that old rascal beat you out of your cattle that way?"

"I can stop the sale for a while if I appeal. But Mr. Weaver, over at the bank, says he don't believe it would do a bit of good to appeal the case. It looks like I'm knocked out for a little while."

"Well, you take it mighty easy!" she said. "They say them cattle's worth twenty thousand dollars, if a cent. I guess if I was to lose twenty dollars you could: hear me from here to the court house."

"Ladies are a little different, I reckon, ma'am," Tom allowed.

"You ought 'a' called for a jury—that's what Myron said at dinner, and he reads the papers, he knows that, if he don't know much else. It oughtn't never 'a' been left to the judge. If you'd 'a' had a jury you'd 'a' sure beat him, with folks in this town knowin' what you've done for them, bringin' back all that money—my-y-y Lord! They say every dollar of it was there. Windy Moore got his back, and his watch. Here he comes now."

Tom had taken a seat beside Mrs. Cowgill at her signalled invitation, where he sat in a tentative, uncomfortable way, well forward on the bench, hat in hand, as if he expected to jump up the next minute and run

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 away. Windy Moore approached in all the refinement and elegance of his pink-striped nellygee, to which he had added a blue-and-white polkadot necktie, done in a Byronial bow with long flowing ends, and a straw hat with brim three fingers wide, hard enough to drive nails.

"Well, Tom," said Windy, coming up in breezy justification of his name, hand out in extreme affability, "I'm not like the feller that can't overlook a joke. Glad to see you back—much obliged to you for bringin' me my watch and roll."

Tom got up, beaming with pleasure. He grasped the little brakeman's hand with the grip of genuine cordiality and joy, clinging to it as if somebody who had strayed away had come back again, redeeming the desolation of his life.

"I'm sure glad to see you, Mr. Moore," he declared, clinging to Windy's hand like a politician, "I sure am mighty glad!"

"Much obliged to you for bringin' me my watch and roll," Windy repeated, bound to pay his debt in an open and public manner, and have done with it there and then, nothing left hanging over to disquiet him in days to come. He was a little superior in spite of his down-bending, a little bit lofty and off-handed, as became a brakeman on a high-ball freight.

Windy sat down on the bench, with Tom between him and Mrs. Cowgill, got out his store cigarettes, which Tom could not refuse for fear of offending him, although he bore a scornful prejudice against any but

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 the kind a man poured and rolled for himself. Mrs. Cowgill's surprise was as great when Tom asked her permission to smoke as if her man Myron had gone to work without being told. Windy Moore looked at him curiously, too, somewhat in contempt for his airs and his weakness.

"They tell me they beat you on that cattle case," said Windy, his trousers pulled up at the knees so high that he looked like a poodle dog about the legs.

"Yes, I lost on this throw," said Tom, speaking as if he had something in reserve, as he had spoken to Mrs. Cowgill a little while before.

"It's a darn stinkin' shame!" said Windy, whose diction was not so elegant out of the newspaper as it was in it. "I'd fight it to the supreme court if it was my case; I wouldn't throw down my hand for no decision like that. If you want money to carry it up, us fellers here in McPacken we'll see that you get it, and that ain't no lie!"

"I appreciate what you say, Mr. Moore; I appreciate it past all words. But I'm told I wouldn't gain anything but delay by makin' an appeal. The higher court couldn't do a thing to help me."

"Where you made your mistake," said Windy, with the largeness of extraordinary sophistication looking down on weakness almost to be despised, "was when you handed that note over to them fellers. If you'd 'a' put a match to it that would 'a' been the end of it. You'd 'a' had your cows, right now."

"That's what I said when I heard of it," Mrs. Cow-

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 gill hastened to throw her stone of condemnation on this poor, bruised, pitiful little act of honor and honesty. "Let me get my hands on a note I've given anybody, and see what'll happen to it!"

Tom looked at her with a grin, which was a weak attempt to discredit her declaration, trying to tell her that he knew very well she'd hand it back to the owner and pay him like a little man, although he felt under the skin that she wouldn't do anything of the sort.

"Maybe I was kind of foolish," he admitted, "but I always was that way."

Tom wanted to get away from them, and the discussion of his loss. Their regretful condemnation of what, to him, was merely a simple act of honesty, was hard to bear in silence. Yet he knew that any attempt to defend his ethical code would only subject him to further pitying correction. According to the view of Mrs. Cowgill and Windy Moore, which might be accepted as the view in epitome of all McPacken, a man who lacked the sense to be dishonest to his own profit ought to be looked after and taken in hand.

Mrs. Cowgill relieved him of her presence and her comments after a while, but Windy Moore stuck. To Tom's great-satisfaction Windy turned the talk to himself and his new consequence as soon as. Mrs. Cowgill left them, keeping it up until the shops' whistle sounded the close of the working day. He advised Tom to get out of the cattle business, now that mischance seemed to have put him out, and get a job as brakeman. He

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 offered to go with him to the superintendent and boost for him from the eminence of his influence.

Tom was grateful for the suggestion and offer of friendly service. After a while, when the law got through with his cattle, he'd be glad to consider it, he said. Right now he was not going to try for any kind of a job. Maybe, after all, he'd have to go to the range, for he didn't seem to have the railroading streak in his blood.

All of which Windy Moore argued down and out, enlarging on the respectability, the manliness, the importance to the national welfare, of a railroad job. Meaning by a railroad job, a job of no lower grade than brakeman, to be sure.

Windy had played his hand to hold Tom there beside him for the swelling satisfaction of being seen in his company by the shop mechanics and roundhouse men when they came in for supper. The news of the cow jerry's return with the money stolen from the bank had found its way into every ear in McPacken long before the whistle blew. Nearly everybody felt a personal interest in the event, for the question of the ability of the bank to make good the depositors' loss had been an open one, with a doubtful issue. The recovery of the money made everybody secure. It was a happy day.

The railroaders were frank in their praise, hearty in their handshakes, from all of which Tom would have escaped if he could. But Windy Moore had him on exhibition at the hotel door, presiding over the affair with a bearing of proprietorship. One might have con-

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 cluded that Windy had been the leading spirit in that long and perilous pursuit, concerning which no man was able at that time, nor ever after, to draw one word out of Tom Laylander's mouth.

Tom got away from them at last, for gratitude is quickly expressed and done with, but hunger in the gizzard of a railroad man requires steak and onions to appease. He was going toward the court house in quest of Louise when he met her. They returned together to the hotel.

"I'm sorry, Tom," she said.

"I knew you would be, dovie," he replied.

"This ends it, I suppose?" she ventured. "They say up at the court house an appeal wouldn't do any good."

"It only begins it, Louise. He's won the first hand; that's all."

"Why, Tom,"—eagerly, a big hope lighting in her eyes, her hand on his arm—"what are you going to do? What is there you can do?"

Tom looked down into her eyes with a great tenderness in his pink, boyish face.

"I'm goin' to wait till the law gets through with my' herd, Louise," he replied, so much more unsaid than said, yet altogether clouded in his mysterious reticence.

"We'll talk it over at supper," she said, flitting off upstairs as light on her feet as Banjo Gibson had calculated her when he first saw her on McPacken's street.

Several railroad men collected quickly about Tom, many of them familiar with his name whom he never had seen before, or had forgotten as incidentals in the

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 general railroad pattern of the town. Some whom he knew to be conductors and engineers, who never had tipped him as much as a nod when he served on the section under Orrin Smith, greeted him like a member of the brotherhood now. That they were sincere about it Tom did not doubt, and would have been wrong if he had admitted such a thought into his ingenuous head.

He was a man who had been in bad company through innocence, rather than depravity, their attitude seemed to say, when he had labored on the section. That was all past and forgiven. The taint of jerry was no longer on his hands.

They repeated, with great earnestness and the pulling out of wallets, the declaration of Windy Moore that all the funds he might need to appeal his case were ready to his hand. More than that; if he wanted to organize a crowd to raid Cal Withers and shoot him off the face of the earth, they were with him; or to ride out and take his cattle away from the sheriff, load them and ship them out of the state, they were ready to get their guns and go. That they meant it, was as plain as the buttons on their coats.

Louise came down while they stood around Tom, their wallets and their rolls in their hands. And that was the interesting juncture at which Banjo Gibson emerged from the dining-room, the shine of chicken gravy on his chin.

"Why, hel-l-l-o, Tom!" Banjo greeted him, nearly bursting the buttons off his stiff-bosomed shirt with

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 his swelling. He came forward offering his hand, his resonant voice loud in the office.

Laylander met his friendly advance with a peculiar kindling of humor and affront in his ruddy countenance. Banjo was before him, full of voluble expostulations of his unbounded joy, his notable banjo-picking right hand offered in jubilant salute. Laylander reached into the pocket of his cougar-skin vest, and bestowed some trifle in the hand of Banjo Gibson with as much indifference as he would throw a base coin to an aggressive beggar. He turned then with a soft word of excuse to the new friends, and genuine, who had come forward in his hour of need, held the dining-room door open to Louise, and left Banjo Gibson looking foolishly at a dime in the palm of his famous banjo-picking palm.

"The presence of that ornery little man, wantin' to shake hands with me!" said Tom. "Only a little while ago he snubbed me like I was a nigger when I come in from work on the section."

Banjo Gibson's loud, resounding, merriment-contagious laugh seemed to answer from the office. He was not to be humbled, not to be outdone. He was passing it off before the engineers and conductors as a rare and mighty joke.

The new girl, heavy as a plow-horse, came to wait on Louise and Tom as they sat at his old table in the far corner by the window. Myron was engaged with a scythe among the tall weeds on the back of the hotel lot;

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132 also terms a false prophet: "He spake as a dragon, and exercised all the power of the first beast in his sight, and caused the earth, and those that dwell therein, to adore the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he shall perform great wonders, so that he can even cause fire to descend from heaven upon the earth in the sight of men, and he shall lead the inhabitants of the earth astray." Let no one imagine that he performs these wonders by divine power, but by the working of magic. And we must not be surprised if, since the demons and apostate spirits are at his service, he through their means performs wonders, by which he leads the inhabitants of the earth astray. John says further: "And he shall order an image of the beast to be made, and he shall give breath to the image, so that the image shall speak; and he shall cause those to be slain who will not adore it." He says also: "And he will cause a mark [to be put] in the forehead and in the right hand, that no one may be able to buy or sell, unless he who has the mark of the name of the beast or the number of his name; and the number is six hundred and sixty-six," that is, six times a hundred, six times ten, and six units. [He gives this] as a summing up of the whole of that apostasy which has taken place during six thousand years.

3. For in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years shall it be concluded. And for this reason the Scripture says: "Thus the heaven and the earth were finished, and all their adornment. And God brought to a conclusion upon the sixth day the works that He had made; and God rested upon the seventh day from all His works." This is an account of the things formerly created, as also it is a prophecy of what is to come. For the day of the Lord is as a thousand years; and in six days created things were completed: it is evident, therefore, that they will come to an end at the sixth thousand year.

4. And therefore throughout all time, man, having been moulded at the beginning by the hands of God, that is, of


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 a smell of fresh-cut jimson and cockleburr came in on the breeze.

The court decision weighed heavier on Louise than Tom. She was downcast and sad; tears were at the brim of her eyes. But indignation against the injustice of the matter was stronger in her breast than grief. She flushed to a fighting heat as they talked it over, Tom glad that she was too generous to arraign him for his weakness, as McPacken in general considered it, in surrendering the note.

"They say Withers will be the only bidder when the cattle are put up under the judgment for sale," she said.

"That's generally the case," Tom told her, having seen many such judgments satisfied in his day. "It would be foolish for me to bid on my own property, and nobody else would want to speculate ten thousand dollars and costs on that herd right now. Withers will pay the costs and take the herd over. That's the way they work it."

"But what are you going to do, Tom?"

"I'm goin' to wait till the law gets through, Louise," he replied, and would reveal no more of his intention than that.

"Ye-es-s," sighed Louise, mournfully regretful, "if you hadn't given up that note!"

Tom felt his heart go down like a bucket in a well; down until it struck the cold water, chilling the little flower of gratitude that had sprung in him for her avoidance of that subject. It struck him harder than the loss of his cattle, sharper than the biggest disap-

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 pointment he ever had suffered in his life. He had thought her too generous to mention that, at least in that long-drawn cadence of regret and blame. He had hoped that if she spoke of it, she would do so with commendation and a little praise.

"I'm sorry, Miss Louise," he said.

"It doesn't do any good now, Tom. It's always better to be safe than sorry, they say."

"I mean I'm sorry you don't approve what I did, Miss Louise. I'm not sorry for handin' the note to the judge. There wasn't anything else for an honorable man to do."

"You're too easy, Tom; you'll have to get over it."

"Yes, Miss Louise."

"Please don't 'Miss Louise' me, Tom."

"No, ma'am."

"You could have torn the note up, you could have left it there—you could have done anything but bring it back and turn it over to them."

"I could," Tom granted, his eyes downcast, his thinlined light eyebrows drawn in his troubled way of fixing his whole soul upon a thing. "Yes, I could, Miss Louise—ma'am."

"You wouldn't have been dishonest, you'd only have been wise. It would have been different if it had been a good note, belonging to an honest man. Who knows when Withers wrote those dates on the back of that note? Well, I'll bet it wasn't more than a month ago, maybe not that long. The scheme for working you out of your remnant of cattle struck him when he was down

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 there in Texas buying up stuff, and not a minute before."

"I expect that's so."

"That note was outlawed years ago, even if it never was paid."

"I haven't got a bit of doubt of it, Miss Louise."

"I wanted to yell at you when you handed the note to the judge, but it happened so unexpectedly, and was done so quickly, I couldn't get my breath to say a word."

"You knew it wouldn't have been right to try to turn me from a little act of plain honesty," Tom said, looking into her eyes with as much tender admiration as if she had done something to deserve it. "It was Colonel Withers's property; it wasn't cancelled, it wasn't crossed out and marked paid. It was as much his, in the face of any proof I could bring to show it had been paid off, as the money in that sack belonged to the bank. What would you have thought of me if I'd headed on south with that, in place of comin' back?"

"That's something different, altogether different," she insisted.

"It's just the same to me," said Tom.

Tom looked out at Myron, hacking away at the big weeds with his scythe, leaving a green confusion behind him. There was a cloud of sadness in Tom's face, as if he felt himself suddenly bereft, and left without consolation in an unfriendly land.

Louise reached over and touched his arm. The heat of indignation had subsided out of her face. She was

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 white, and sorry, and penitent for the pain she had given him by her adherence to this worldly interpretation between right and wrong.

"You are right, Tom; it would have been just the same," she said.

The sun was out again in a burst of gladness for Tom Laylander, the earth was made a bright and happy place. A word is so much when a man needs it; so much more, indeed, than the nearest of his all can always understand Mrs. Cowgill came through the swinging door from the office, showing in Judson Weaver. Instead of putting him down at one of the tables reserved for guests of such consequence, she headed straight for the obscure corner where Tom and Louise were finishing their custard pie. There Mrs. Cowgill stopped, spreading her hands in a gesture of delivery, her eyes lively with expectancy, her smile as broad as it would go.

"Sit still, sit still," Banker Weaver protested, as Tom started to rise. "I'm not going to stop, I just ran in on my way home for a word with you."

"Yes, sir," said Tom, standing half up and half down, about as awkward and embarrassed a young man as ever came off the Texas range.

"Our directors voted you a little expression of our appreciation this afternoon, Tom, which it is my great pleasure to put into your hand," the banker said.

It was a check for a thousand dollars. The banker put it on the corner of the table, seeing that Tom seemed to have no hand under control to reach out and

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 take it. Mrs. Cowgill leaned over and looked at it, lifted her hands in her gesture of absolute surrender, opened her mouth in soundless astonishment, and stood posed that way, waiting for Tom to pick it up.

"Why, sir, I couldn't begin to accept of it!" said Tom.

"My-y-y lands!" Mrs. Cowgill said.

"We realize that money can't pay you for the service you've done us," the banker continued, trying to make it easier for Tom, it seemed. "Our appreciation goes with the check, our unbounded admiration and respect."

"That's worth more to me than any amount of money, sir," Tom replied, with simple dignity, simple sincerity. "Please hand this check back to the directors with my thanks. I couldn't think of accepting of it, sir."

"My-y-y lands! but you're easy!" Mrs. Cowgill said.

Louise took up the check, seeing the banker's embarrassment, and handed it back to him with a smile.

"Please put it on deposit to his account, Mr. Weaver," Louise requested, such a red rush of blood Tising to her face that the last tear in her eyes must have been evaporated as if dropped on Mrs. Cowsgill's range.

"Good!" said the banker. "Endorse it for him," offering his pen with a broad smile. "Now, that settles it."

"I couldn't begin to think of ever drawin' on it," Tom protested.

"Keep still," the banker advised, "and let your man-

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 ager do the talking when there's any to be done. You need one as bad as anybody I ever saw, and I'm glad you've got a good one."

He gave Tom a slap on the shoulder, and Louise a knowing look, going his way with a grin, deaf to Tom's protestations that he never would touch a cent of it.

"Well, you are easy!" Mrs. Cowgill said, hurrying off after the banker as if the thousand dollar check in his pocket were a magnet that would draw her to the end of the world and over the edge.

Tom knew that she meant he was a bigger fool than she had thought any man of his size could possibly be. Louise looked at him tenderly. Tom felt that it was just as Judson Weaver had said. He was entirely in her hands.

"Get your hat," Louise directed him. "Let's take a walk down toward the river."

"Yes, Miss Louise."

"Oh, don't 'Miss Louise' me, Tom," she corrected, but with such great tenderness for his lubberly ways that it was almost a caress.

"No, ma'am," said Tom, contritely, coming up very red with his hat.

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HIRTY-ODD miles to her brother's ranch down near the line of the Nation was nothing to Maud Kelly. She appeared at the hotel on Sunday morning in a buckboard with her valise lashed to its slatted deck, a spunky span of young horses fretting at the stop, to pick up Louise and carry her away into the cowboy-infested wilds.

Maud wanted Tom Laylander to go along, insisting that the seat was plenty wide enough for three. When Tom expressed doubt of the comfort they would have with him crowding in, Maud suggested that she and Louise could take turn about sitting on his lap, to ease the crowding and give them elbow room.

If anything had been lacking to keep Tom out of the expedition, Maud's ingenuous proposal settled it for him. He backed off, fairly crippled by confusion. Louise had better success. She suggested a ride down to visit them at the ranch, to which Tom agreed. He said he would be going down in that direction to look over his cattle and see how they were filling out in a

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 day or two. He'd be proud to ride on down to the ranch.

As the girls drove away, Tom waving them farewell from the hotel corner with his hat, they talked of the way he still claimed ownership of the cattle, neither of them able to account for his apparent stupidity in clinging to something that was already hopelessly lost. He seemed just as much interested in the cattle as if nothing had happened. Whether it was his simplicity, sustained by some glamorous hope, or some deep intention of an act of reprisal against Withers, they could not understand.

"I'd like to help the kid out," said Maud, who was cattle-wise, as well as worldly-wise.

"It looks hopeless," Louise declared. "He's so touchy about taking anything from anybody, even help. If anybody ever helps Tom Laylander they'll have to put it over on him in the dark."

"He'd just as well go on down there and kiss them cows good-by, they're the same as Cal Withers's now. But say; I wonder!"

"You wonder what, Maud?"

"I was just thinkin'. I believe I know where the sheriff's got that herd—it must be down a few miles from Jim's ranch. Jim could be trusted to go in on anything that would soak old Cal Withers; he owes that old boy one that he's been itchin' a long time to pay."

"What's your scheme, Maud?"

"I'm not sayin' much about it right now, kid," Maud

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 said, but with a grin on her big honest mouth as she turned a roguish eye to Louise. "Somebody's got to help that red-headed boy out of his troubles."

"It isn't just what you could call red, Maud," Louise corrected, knowing very well that her face was positively so.

"Near enough to pass. He'll be down tomorrow."

"I don't know."

"Sure he will. He can take a hand—no, he can't, but he can sit in the hammock and hold yours. That'll leave me alone to work out my desperate scheme."

"How about Mr. Cook?"

"Mr. Cook?" Maud repeated blankly. "Who's Mr. Cook?"

"Why, the man you're going to marry! the baggage—"

"Oh, you mean Sam. He'll not be down; he's got his orders, straight from headquarters, to give me a rest for two solid weeks."

There was not much more of a road going down to Jim Kelly's ranch than a ship leaves after it on the sea. Every driver struck a course to suit his own pleasure in the vastness of that untrammeled country. Sometimes Maud followed where somebody else had gone, again she drove for miles where a wheel seemed never to have pressed before.

It was a broken prairie, thrown in easy-rising long ridges, gently heaving, like nothing so much as an ocean whose swells had been fixed by some strange caprice of nature in these grassy undulations. At a distance the

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 prairie appeared level to the eye, the farthest bound of the vision defined sharply, as the horizon comes down upon the sea. The ridges were bare of all growth except short buffalo grass, grayish-green in this summer season, brighter in the swales, where clumps of wild briars and fire-stunted shrubs huddled as if hiding away out of the incessant wind.

They passed a few sod ranch-houses, out of which children came running to pile up against the wire fences and stare, like tumble-weeds rolled up and lodged by the wind. Women sometimes appeared in the dark doors to wave greeting to Maud. Distant herds were spread wide over the gray pasture lands. It was a melancholy country, a lonely and depressing ride. At least Louise found it so. To Maud it was home, with nothing more remarkable nor peculiar about it than home has for anybody, anywhere.

Toward evening, the whole day being consumed in the leisurely drive, they struck Tom Laylander's herd, watched over by two young men who came galloping when Maud pulled up and waved her hat. They were lonesome and tired of their job, neither of them being arange man. As a regular business, one was employed in the livery stable at McPacken, the other as office deputy by the sheriff. They had a chuck-wagon and a negro cook over on a little creek among the trees, they said.

Maud expressed surprise that they two were alone with the cattle, the report in McPacken being that no fewer than ten men were holding them. There had

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 been more, the herders said; the sheriff had called them off to chase the bank robbers, and they never had come back. Sick of the job, just like themselves, the office 'man said; glad to get back to town, and stay there. Nothing to it down there on the edge of nowhere watching a lot of fool cows at two dollars a day. A man could make more than that shootin' pool up in town.

"Just as well not have us here, they go where they darn please anyhow," the youth complained.

"That's right," Maud agreed. "There's no more need for a man along with a bunch of cattle this time of the year, especially a little bunch like this, than I've got foranurse. How's the grub?"

"Bum!" said the office man, with explosive disgust. "I'd give six dollars for a dish of steak and onions like you used to bring us up at the hotel, Louise."

"That's one of the luxuries of your past that you'll never enjoy from my fine Italian hand again," Louise told him. "There's another lady on that job now."

"You don't mean to tell me you've quit the hotel, Louise?"

"Yes, I'm a tax-eater now, the same as you."

"Court house job, you mean, Louise?"

"Sure," said Maud. "She's got my job."

The young man was voluble in his congratulations. He was also somewhat astonished by the sudden and spectacular rise of a biscuit-shooter to a position at the public manger. But he was shrewd enough to run the mystery of her rise quickly to its source. That source was old man Kelly. He was still a dictator in the party

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 councils of that county. So there was nothing extraordinary about it after all, except that a girl whom he had counted in as just a common sort with an uncommonly handsome figure and face, should spring at a bound from the bottom of the social ladder in McPacken to the very top. She would be worth cultivating when he went back to his clean and easy job. The young man made a large and impressive note of that.

"We're going to be down at Jim's for a week or so. Maybe we can cheer you up a little until the cattle are sold," Maud suggested.

The deputy sheriffs had not heard of the court decision, although they had expected it would go that way. It cheered them greatly to learn that their unremunerative and unromantic employment was nearly at an end.

"We're going to have a little dance over at Jim's tomorrow night," Maud announced, although it was news to Louise. "Round up your cows so the cook can keep his eye on 'em and come over."

Sure they would, they promised. The fool cows didn't need any watching, not at night, anyhow. Nobody ever watched them at night—what was the sense? When they got ready to bunk, they bunked, and when they wanted to get up and snort around they didn't wait for no little cowboy to come and call them. Sure they'd come. They'd wear the girls' feet off up to their knees dancin', and that wasn't no lie.

"You know where Jim's ranch is? down here about four miles," said Maud.

Sure they knew where it was. Them fool cows had

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 roamed off down there a day or two ago, and stood with their necks over Jim's fence like they'd come home and found the door locked. They'd hung around there till Jim's wife had come out with the broom and run 'em off. Sure they'd come. Ten to one them darn cows would foller them, and line up along the fence.

"That's a good looking bunch of cattle, surprising good," said Maud, as they drove along the edge of the scattered herd. "It's a darn shame that kid's got to lose 'em, they'd sell for forty to forty-five a head right now."

"Tom said he believed they'd net twenty thousand dollars on the Kansas City market," Louise sighed. "It's a lot of money to be swindled out of."

"Ye-es," Maud drawled, her eyes fixed on a point miles ahead, as jf making a far-off calculation of her own.

"I never heard anything about a dance tomorrow night," said Louise.

"Neither did I," Maud replied. "But you heard what I said."

"Where are you going to scare up enough people for a dance in this country?"

"There'll be you and I and Jinny, Jim's wife, for a starter, right on the spot. We'll shoot around tomorrow and spread the alarm. It'll surprise you how many girls will jump up out of the short grass down here."

"But what's the scheme, Maud?"

"Entertainment, my darling; entertainment for two

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 poor little cowboys far away from the pool hall at MePacken."

Jim Kelly's house was built of straight up-and-down planks, stripped with battens, like a barn. It was not as comfortable as a sod house, and nothing could have been more unattractive, its raw planks stark and unpainted against the harmony of gray prairie and blue sky in that treeless immensity. But it was a mark of affluence and superiority to live in a plank house where sod houses were the rule. Comfort and æsthetics have been sacrificed to the same vanity in other places at other times.

Kelly's house was a notable one on the old cattle trail leading from Texas through the Cherokee Outlet; there was nothing as grand or as costly within many a day's travel to the south. The material had been freighted from McPacken, in itself not much of a task, the house knocked together like a huge box without foundation or previous leveling of the land. There were irregular pillars of rock under one end of it to lift it to a level, making a convenient place beneath the floor for chickens and dogs.

It was a long quadrangular building, with five doors opening in its front. It looked like a barracks, or a bunk-house, with all these exits ready to the necessity of men in a hurry, but it was devoted solely to the use of Jim's family, which comprised himself and his wife Jinny, a little Jim and a littler Jinny.

There was no doubt which was the main door among all the doors. It was easily picked out by the grease

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 where little Jim and Jinny had pushed it, and the abrasions where their copper-toed shoes had kicked it, with numerous marks of dogs' claws between.

There was only the width of a township, six miles, between Jim's ranch and the Indian Territory line. The Indian country to the south of them was spoken of by everybody in that part of Kansas as the Nation, the possessions of the Cherokee Nation lying along there. The Cherokees leased a great deal of their land to Kansas cattlemen, among whom Jim Kelly was one.

Jim was a man of importance in the cattle industry, prosperous and shrewd, well on the way to independence. Jinny was figuring seriously on a house in McPacken, with cupolas and bay windows, stained glass side-lights in the front entrance, a design in stained glass in the transom over the front door. That was cattleman luxury in those days. Beyond the achievement of such a house, in such a town as McPacken, the world had nothing more to give.

A barbed wire fence enclosed Jim's house, his weak looking garden and such structures for the shelter of poultry and livestock as he possessed. These latter were inconsiderable, the cattleman's last thought being for the comfort or welfare of the beasts that served him, or from which his profits were drawn. Altogether the premises had a temporary, homeless, cheerless, bare, uninviting appearance. Louise was surprised to find the place so bleak. She had expected better things of anybody belonging to Maud.

Jim was at home, on account of it being Sunday and

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 company expected. He was at the gap in the wire fence, the cut strands unhooked to let them drive in, shaved to a rather raw look about the chin, which was several shades lighter than the upper part of his face. Louise concluded a considerable growth of whiskers had fallen to Jim's razor that day, a long-deferred sacrifice, doubtless due to pressure afield.

Jim was a tall flat man, with a large red mustache, having a gaunt look about the eyes such as seemed to be the Kelly brand. He was an affable and loquacious man, loud and familiar in his way.

Jinny came out, her little Kellys running before, looking rather Teutonic and robust, her long and abundant yellowish hair wound in a shining braid around herhead. It was plain at a glance that she was quite content in her long flimsy house with many doors, just about the sort of woman one would expect to come out of it, indeed. She had many years ahead of her to enjoy the cupolas and stained glass windows, as well as the groundwork for the flesh that would accumulate with idleness and grandeur.

Jinny had a piano in her parlor, a wonder and delight in a land where pianos afterwards became as common as toadstools. Jinny could not play it, but Jim could do enough for all the rest of the family and the neighborhood for sixty miles around, if volume of sound could be taken as a measure of his musical proficiency. His repertory was not large, yet it was sufficient for the needs and understanding of those who

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 stopped to hear him slam his tunes off with such forceful pedaling that shook the house.

Maud was something better at the piano than Jim. Her selections covered a wider range, including the latest songs. She was obliged to play them all after supper for Jim and Jinny, and an ancient cowboy with harsh white hair that stood erect, giving his countenance a constant expression of mild astonishment.

This old-timer sat with his chair reared back against the wall, his feet on the forward rungs, holding an unlit cigarette plastered to his under lip. He put out his tongue frequently and shifted it a little, working his mouth afterwards as if tasting it. Louise grew nervous waiting for him to light it, which he did not do, although he held a match ready all the time. It was not delicacy that restrained him, she was certain, for Jim was smoking a cigar that brought recollections of Pap Cowgill.

The cowboy, or the cow grandfather, as Louise thought suited his years better, was greatly interested in the dance proposed by Maud for the next night. Jim consulted him gravely on the prospect of this one and that one being able to come, and whether so-and-so could be rounded up to fiddle, and somebody else, who must have been a notable person from their glowing enthusiasm in speaking of him, might be roped in to call off. Frank, the shock-haired veteran, believed he could reach this accomplished person by setting out at once, to which Jim agreed.

Louise was not surprised by the eagerness with which

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 Jim and Jinny took up the arrangements for the dance. It was plain to see that any sort of diversion in their cattle-hedged existence was welcome, both of them young and full of healthful enjoyment in association with their kind. Jinny took stock of her canned oysters, to make sure whether there would be enough for soup, Jim standing ready to despatch one of his men to McPacken at once to replenish the supply.

Jim did not seem relieved nor greatly concerned when Jinny reported sufficient oysters for the occasion on hand. A little ride of sixty miles for a dollar's worth of cove oysters would have been only a trifling incident in Jim's daily habit of encompassing wide spaces, nothing at all to interfere with the success of a dance in his house, famous for its hospitality.

Maud said it would be her farewell to the range, and she was going to throw a leg over the moon. This pleased Frank so greatly that he struck his match as he stood in the door taking his leave, and lifted it to within a few inches of his cigarette, where he seemed to remember something, and blew it out. They heard him galloping away presently on his quest of the man whose calling off was so essential to the happiness of everybody.

"It's too bad Mr. Cook can't be here," said Louise.

"Mr. Cook?" said Jim, staring at her. "Who's Mr. Cook?"

"Maud's beau, the baggage—"

"Oh, Sam. I guess he'll have dancin' enough when

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 he marries Maud—dancin' around to make a livin'. He'd better take all the rest he can beforehand."

Maud was at the piano. She slewed her head to make a big grin at her humorous brother, who poked his comfortable wife in the side. Jinny jumped, squealing like a mare.

sang Maud, her wild, rich voice flooding out into the prairie through the five doors of the long, low house.

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T turned out that the man of-accomplishment so indispensable to the gaiety of the occasion was a saturnine, dark-faced, sinewy hillbilly, originally from the Ozarks of Missouri. He called off the figures of the dances through a small aperture in the corner of his twisted mouth, running the rest of the sound out of his nose.

This man was foreman on a ranch forty of fifty miles distant from Jim Kelly's. He had come at Frank's long-carried invitation, though what pleasure he got out of the dance himself was beyond Louise Gardner's speculative realm. Glum and ill-favored, he appeared to look on it all as a trifling piece of folly in which circumstances had forced him to play a part. He grinned a little at rare intervals, a sort of beginning and ending of a grin, with none of the full-spread humor, but as a caller he was eminent in the land. He danced but seldom, and then with Louise. He said he was acquainted with her; she had served him breakfast once at the hotel.

True to Maud's prediction, Tom Laylander arrived

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 at the ranch toward evening. He came riding the outlaw's horse, with the long-carrying rifle that he had wrenched from the dead robber's hand as he lay before the bank door. He told Louise he had spent the afternoon looking over his cattle. They had filled out surprisingly, he said; many of the younger ones could be marketed in a pinch just as they stood.

Tom was not in the mood for dancing that night, he said. He jigged through a set with Jinny, dischargsing his obligation of respect; one with Maud, because she asked him to, and another with Louise, to keep her away from the ranch foreman who called off through his nose, and wore a black shirt without coat or vest, with a necktie as red as a flame. The rest of the time he stood around talking with Jim and his guests in his soft, drawling speech, so much in contrast with the loud, harsh, wide-open-mouthed delivery of the Kansas tongue. Jinny said he sounded as if he mashed the words in the roof of his mouth.

The two deputy sheriffs on guard over what once had been Tom Laylander's herd were there, going it strong on oyster soup, and something that was not soup, which Jim Kelly had in a jug behind the chicken house. They were taking compensation in a lump for their desolate days on the range.

Tom Laylander was the star of the occasion, in spite of his modest withdrawal from its activities in his attempt to eliminate himself from public notice. Jim wanted the story of Tom's ride in pursuit of the bank robbers; how he had picked them off with the dead ban-

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 dit's rifle, until he had reduced their numbers, and then closed in; whether the last of them had put up much of a fight, and how Tom had managed to come through without a scratch. Jim drew the guests around him by his loud and insistent interrogation, which was not intended for anything but lively, admiring, friendly interest, no matter for its rudeness.

Tom tried to back out of it, as if they had cornered him with some shameful accusation, levelling the matter down with his expressive hands, smoothing it to a thing of utmost simplicity, so small and unworthy that it did not merit a word. He said it really amounted to nothing at all; that it was all over, anyhow, and they must excuse him from discussing it, or any phase of it, now.

Louise understood how hard it was for him, generous, modest, truly valiant as she knew him to be. She thought that if Jim Kelly, and some of the others who looked at Tom with their uncomprehending, bold stare of curiosity, could see as deeply into his heart as she had seen, they never would say again that he had come through that experience without a scratch.

Laylander had left something out of his youth and the redundant joy of his life on that hard ride into No Man's Land. There was a wound in the plastic soul of his young manhood that gaped wide and deep. Time would cicatrize it into a harsh, rought scar; memory would touch it in after years with a shudder. A gentleman does not live through an experience such as that and come away unmarked.

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 Anyway, it was a triumph for Jim and Jinny to have a man so notable on display before their guests. The men all came up and shook hands with Tom, and said they were proud to know him, which was sincere and true. They were outspoken in their denunciation of Cal Withers, almost to a man. If Tom had put his case before a jury of twelve cattlemen, they said, Cal Withers would have been looking around by now for somebody else to skin; he never would have got judgment on that note.

When they talked among themselves, however, they turned queer glances around at Tom, and spoke with voices lowered. He seemed to be such a simple kind of a feller, they said. Maybe he hadn't understood what a dangerous thing he was foolin' with when he took out after them bank robbers that way, hot-foot and alone. It was something like a baby hackin' at a with a hatchet, they guessed; a lucky lick or two had saved him where a wiser man might have been killed.

That was about the size of it, judgin' from the looks of him, a young strawberry-complected feller like him. He didn't know what he was up to when he grabbed that rifle and rode off after them fellers. Luck had carried him through, but it was luck that darn few men ever enjoyed. The way he handed that note over in court proved he had a screw loose. No sensible man would have done a thing like that. It was well known that simple people could go through great perils and come out whole. That had happened so often in fron-

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 tier experience that no man would dispute it. It was one of the mysterious laws of luck.

Frank, the dean of the range, was flinging a high heel that night. He was smoothed up for the event quite a bit, except his hair. That seemed to stand up straighter, as if alert for the pleasure of the dance. Frank fixed his favors on Maud, dancing with her at every opening, swinging her as if he felt that duty constrained him to assist her in the acrobatic feat she had set for herself in this farewell she was taking of the range.

At midnight the company began to thin out; an hour later there were only ladies enough for a set, counting the three in the house. They danced this farewell measure to Jim's playing, after which everybody took horse and galloped off as if a penalty for being abroad approached with the dawn.

The two deputy sheriffs were the last to go, owing to some difficulty they had getting on their horses. They had been the most devoted patrons of Jim's jug, which was not a cider jug as he solemnly protested to Jinny. Between the efforts of Jim and Laylander, they were hoisted up and set on their way.

"I guess if their horses don't take 'em to camp they'll go to McPacken," Jim said.

"Maybe I'd better go with 'em and see they don't wander off," Tom suggested.

"No, let 'em go. Nothing's goin' to hurt 'em."

Tom was for setting out for McPacken himself, but Jim and Jinny would not hear of it. Maud said she

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 would be offended forever unless he remained over a day or two. Louise could not add her word, but she did all that a girl could do with her eyes, and Tom yielded, without any great expenditure of persuasion. Jim opened one of the five doors and told him to make himself at home.

The household was astir early next morning, even to little Jinny and Jim, for a little indulgence will not break a habit that necessity has fixed upon a man. Tom was out with the first gleam of sun, feeling more at home than he had since coming to Kansas. It was like old times to see the sun come up that way at the level edge of the world.

Maud and Louise were a little late coming to breakfast, at which they finally appeared in riding habits, looking as fresh as buttermilk, Jim said.

"Where do you two intend to go straddlin' off to this morning?" he inquired. "Them town ridin' bloomers of yours're liable to scare all the cows on the range."

"You'll have to take the chance, then," said Maud, with her wide-spreading grin. "I'm going over to the Nation with Louise to show her some squaws and squawks."

"Great sight," said Jinny, contemptuous of the lowly creatures.

"We'll have Tom along. He's a cowman; he can head off any stampede we start," Maud explained.

"You'll go, won't you Tom?" Louise appealed.

"I'd just love to," Tom replied.

"Somebody a ridin' up," Jinny announced. She

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 leaned to look out of the open door, a platter of ham and eggs raised high to balance her.

"It's them two deputy sheriffs," said Jim, curious speculation in his voice. "Wonder what they're back here after?"

"More cider," said Jinny, scornful of man's weakness.

"Hello, boys!" Jim hailed from the door, too much interested in breakfast to go very far away from it. "Light and look at your saddles. Come on in and get some breakfast."

Jinny had anticipated this shouted invitation. She was at the cupboard after more plates and cups, and Maud, knowing the rule of hospitality in that country, was closing little Jim and Jinny up, making room for the visitors at the end of the table. Louise heard the crunch on the gravel path leading from gate to door.

"Say, Jim, you ain't seen them darn cows of ours around here this morning, have you?" one of the deputies inquired, considerably troubled.

"No. What's the matter of 'em?"

"Gone," another voice replied. "We left 'em there, all bunked down when we come over here last night. There wasn't a hide or hair of 'em in sight when we got up this morning."

"Have you looked around over there?" Jim asked.

"Sure we have. They're gone as clean as if the wind had blowed 'em away."

Louise looked at Tom, who turned toward the door, listening to what was being reported. She wondered

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 what new trouble was coming now. Tom excused himself and went to the door.

"I guess they're around somewhere, they couldn't go very far in that time," Jim said, more amused than concerned. He held the screen door open. "Come in and get some breakfast, then me and Tom we'll ride over with you and see if we can't find 'em."

"We'd sure be obliged to you if you would," said the livery stable cowboy, his foot in the door. "What us fellers don't know about cows'd surprise you."

"And that ain't no lie," the other one seconded. He came in after his companion, both of them grinning at the girls and giving everybody greeting.

"No use to worry," Jinny assured them; "they're right around there some place. Cattle don't stampede off this kind of weather very often."

"Well, it does happen sometimes," Jim seemed to: soliloquize, engaged again with his ham and eggs. "They might 'a' got a scare at something and bucked off, but they wouldn't go far."

"We'll be in a one h—, we'll be in a d—, we'll be in one grand fix," said the livery stable cowboy, hitting a polite exposition of their situation at last, pronouncing it with desperate earnestness, "if we can't find them cows in time for the sale. What do you suppose they'll do to us, Jim?"

"Send us up for about forty-nine years!" said the other cowboy, gloomily.

"We'll find 'em, all right," Jim declared.

The two deputies appeared to be quite sober, although

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 they had no craving for ham and eggs. They drank coffee from their saucers, sitting uneasily, ready to jump and go.

"What did that nigger cook say happened to the herd?" Tom inquired.

"He didn't know nothing about it till he looked out of his wagon this morning," the clerk cowboy replied. "We made a mistake leavin' them darn cattle alone last night."

"It sure looks like it," Tom agreed.

"We'll get about fifty-five years apiece if we don't find 'em in time for the sale."

Maud began to talk then, and Jinny, seeing what a scare the two young men had got thrown into them. Louise kept her peace, not being a cow authority. But she was passing through a curious fluctuation of hope and dread; a glow as of some undefined joy rising in her one moment, sinking away to the cold depression of despair the next. What had become of the cattle? Who had driven them off? Who was there to gain anything by their removal from the sheriff's custody but Tom? And Tom would no more have thought of doing it than he would have thought of robbing Jim Kelly of the horses in his corral.

"They're right around there in a holler somewhere," said Jim. "You boys overlooked 'em, easy enough to do unless you're used to cattle. Five or six hundred head's nothing but a speck on the range, 'specially when they bunch up and lay down somewhere in a holler."

Tom was silent. If he had any theories he kept them

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 to himself, as Louise expected of him. But she looked at him appealingly, as if asking him to say something that would assure and quiet her uneasy perplexity. He only shook his head.

"Let's go with them, Louise," Maud proposed, all animation for the adventure. "I want to see the hole that swallowed five hundred head of cattle while the cute little shepherd boys were asleep."

Louise hesitated, glancing at Tom for his opinion.

"I'd love to have you come," he said.

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And after—Praise be to God, who sets apart anyone whom He will for His knowledge, rendering him fit for understanding His Law and following His path, informing him of the hidden recesses of His knowledge, the real meaning of His inspiration, and the purpose of sending the Apostle to creatures, in spite of what has become clear about the doubt of the doubters among the Prophet's own followers, and changes of meanings introduced by the false among


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OM LAYLANDER reined up on the trail the herd had left on the prairie, which was broad and plain enough for the most inexperienced per son to follow, it seemed. He sat light and straight in the saddle, the outlaw's rifle in its scabbard under the joint of his knee, his pistol at his side, looking like a Texas ranger on the track of contraband. He held his reins high over the horn of his saddle as he sat looking into the south, the direction the cattle had gone.

Jim Kelly reared back and laughed, sweeping his hand to call attention to the trail.

"Tom, your cows have headed for home!" he said. "They're ten miles over in the Nation by now."

"Sa-ay, do you think that's so?" the livery cowboy asked, his mouth open in dismay.

"Surest thing you know," Jim replied, rocking again with laughter.

Maud was in little more decorous state than her hilarious brother. She was chuckling over the two deputies' humiliation over the ungenerous behavior of their cattle.

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 "Texas cattle always get homesick that way," she explained to Louise, but for the benefit of the two worried young men from town.

"When the wind's in the south you've got to hold 'em," said Jim. "They can smell home, they always begin to mill around and hold their heads high. They'll buck off on a stampede as quick as you can drop your hat sometimes when the wind's in the south. Didn't the sheriff tell you that?"

"He never told us nothin'!" the clerk cowboy said. "Now they'll send us up for about seventy years."

"Yes, they will stampede when the wind's in the south," Jim said. He beat his horse's neck with his hat, doubling over his saddle-horn in a new seizure of risibility.

Louise began to see the humor of the situation, and more. She looked into Maud's audacious eyes, which laughter had pinched to little slits, understanding now that this was the result of the shrewd girl's planning, into which her equally clever brother had entered with all his keen desire to throw a trick against Cal Withers.

"It's the funniest thing!" said Louise, gratitude, and laughter, and a great uplifting of exultation and relief, setting a glow in her face like the chafing of a wintry wind.

"Ain't it?" said Maud, letting out a whoop equal to the highest-keyed cowboy on the range, riding a hilarious circle around the little group.

Tom rode slowly along the herd's trail a little way, and to the side of it, coming back with serious face.

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 He was far from seeing, or even suspecting the trick that had been turned on them as the two green hands from town.

"You'll have to trot after 'em Tom," said Jim. "They'll cut diagonal across the Nation, only ninety or a hundred miles to home. That was a lucky little stampede for, you, old son."

"Do you reckon that old scoundrel drove that herd off?" Tom put it to Jim, eye to eye.

"Cal Withers, you mean? No-o-o. They stampeded. You never had a herd of Texas cattle up here in Kansas before, you don't know their tricks."

"Three or four men drove 'em off," said Tom, going right on with it in spite of Louise's hand put up to silence him, and Maud's shrill whistle to head him off.

"That's where these boys have been ridin' around," said Jim.

"We've got to go after 'em and drive 'em back," one of the deputies declared.

"If we don't," his companion said, "old Judge Burns he'll soak us for about a hundred years apiece. Will you give us a hand with 'em, Jim?"

"I guess we might as well all go along," said Jim. "I'm kind of curious to see how far they went."

Jim looked at Laylander curiously, almost reproachfully. Tom seemed sorry, judging from the look of his glum face, that the cattle had been put by chance or design—a generous man never would question how—where he could reach out and take them, and go on to

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 Texas with them. No court would recognize Cal Withers's judgment there.

They swung off on the trail of the cattle, Tom pretty well in the lead. He rode with his head up, his eyes and thoughts fixed far ahead of him, it seemed. Little was said as they covered the few miles to the Indian Territory line. Four or five miles on the other side they found the herd. It was spread out in good grazing order, picketed by four men.

"Well, there's your cows," said Jim, turning to the deputy sheriffs, waving his hand toward the herd.

Tom halted, as if indecisive; the deputies rode forward in eager haste. Maud and Louise drew up beside Tom, Jim lounging in his saddle a little to one side, greatly interested in the movement of the deputy sheriffs, and the man who rode out from the herd to meet them.

"You're not going to let them drive the cattle back, are you, Tom?" Louise inquired. She leaned and touched his arm, as if to call him from his abstraction, anxiety in her voice.

"There's nothing else to be done," Tom replied.

"Why, after all they've—after all that's been—after—after everything—surely you'll not do that, Tom?"

Jim and Maud were talking apart a little way, throwing quick glances at Tom now and then.

"It's not Colonel Withers's gang," said Tom.

"Of course it isn't!" Louise returned sharply, out of patience with his stupidity.

Jim and Maud rode on; the others followed, nothing

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 more said. Louise looked at Tom reproachfully, indignantly, now and then, a flash in her eyes, a lift to her chin that seemed little short of disdain. Couldn't the man understand, or wouldn't he understand? Was it density, rising out of his fine notions of honor, that kept him from seeing the hands behind this bold stroke for the restoration of his property? He seemed even incapable of thinking his friends would do a thing like that, instead of whooping it up and thanking them, as a natural man ought to do.

An Indian cowboy rode up with the two deputies, who looked very deeply troubled, and exceedingly wild about the eyes.

"This feller says they stopped them cows when they come rairin' and stampedin' through here last night," the livery stable wrangler, whom they called Hank, explained. "He's tryin' to hold us up for a dollar a head charges before he'll let us drive 'em back to Kansas."

"What do you think of that for a chunk of gall? A dollar a head!" said the other deputy, familiarly called Perry by Maud and her brother.

"That's the customary charge for stock"—Jim pronounced it stalk—"that stampedes off down here." Jim took it very easily, as a thing that fell in every day usage, although he could not have cited a precedent in all his years on the border range.

"Well, I ain't got no dollar a head to pay for nobody's cows," Perry declared.

"Here too," voted Hank.

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 "How many have you got in that herd?" Jim asked the Indian.

"Around five hundred and fifty head."

"Five hundred and fifty plunks!" said Hank, despairingly, as if he had seen a fortune swept away.

"Say, if you'll call it a dime a head we'll try to raise the money," Perry proposed.

The Indian was not concerned in the offer enough to reject it. He sat black, silent and sulky, hat pulled down to his eyebrows, his horse snatching a little doze as it stood in the warm morning sun.

"What're we goin' to do about it?" Hank asked his partner.

"I guess we just as well ride on south till we drop off of the earth," Perry replied, full of disgust with himself for allowing the cattle to get away, and gloom for his future peace in the ribald city of McPacken.

"You talk to him, Jim. Maybe he'll let 'em go for you," Hank appealed.

"I'm willin' to do you a friendly turn any way I can, boys, but this ain't a case for me to horn in. These boys stopped your stalk; custom of the country and the law of the land allows 'em to collect services and damages."

"Damages?" Perry repeated. "They never stepped on nothing down here but the earth."

"You've got to pay fifty cents a head for drivin' through the Cherokee Strip," said Jim.

"Well, we never drove through," Hank denied, with intense feeling.

"And that ain't no dream!" said Perry.

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 "It's between you and them," Jim told them, his hands out of it completely. He rode off to one side to better express his complete severance and division from the affairs of the two Kansas deputies.

"This feller says no kind of a badge but one with U.S. on it goes on this side of the line," said Hank. "Is that right, Jim?"

"Sure it's right," Jim replied. "Perry ought to know that—he's been hangin' around the sheriff's office long enough."

"We ain't got no jurisdiction here," Perry admitted, shaking his doleful head.

The two drew off to discuss the matter between them, Tom watching them curiously, with a sort of impatient disdain.

"I wouldn't give five hundred bucks for them darned cows and take 'em to keep," Hank declared. He looked spitefully at the animals which had played him such a false and treacherous turn while he stole his hour of pleasure. They were browsing serenely, spread out over considerable ground, some of them so near the crisp, ripping sound of the grass could be heard as they gathered it with out-licking tongues.

"Well boys, if you want to know from me what I think about it," said Jim, assuming a judicial gravity, "I'd say go on back to town and report to the sheriff that the herd stampeded off in the night. That's all you can do, unless you pay these boys their price and take 'em."

"Not on your life!" said Hank.

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 "It was an act of providence," said Jim. "No judge in the world can lay hands on a man for an act of providence. Go up there and tell 'em that."

"Right here's where I resign!" said Perry, as with sudden inspiration that cleared all his difficulties away in a breath.

"Act of providence or no act of providence, I'm with you!" Hank declared.

"If you see anybody lookin' for us, tell 'em we've gone to McPacken," Perry requested.

"As far as we're concerned, pardner, you can keep them cows," Hank addressed the Indian with lofty relief. "Providence drove 'em down here, and we ain't a goin' to run agin providence drivin' 'em back."

They galloped for the line, their interest all ahead of them. The Indian cowboy grinned.

"Well, there's your stalk, Tom," said Jim Kelly, his enthusiasm and humor rising again. "It's not goin' to cost you any dollar a head to take 'em, neither. Them's my men holdin' 'em."

"Yes, sir. It occurred to me they must be," said Tom.

"I'll let you have a couple of 'em to help you across the river; you can make the drive in eight or ten days. Hold 'em a little north of southwest and you'll hit the old crossin'. You can walk 'em over this time of the year."

"Yes sir, I don't doubt it could be done," said Tom.

"They're on my grass now; I lease down here," Jim

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 explained. "That ain't goin' to cost you anything, either."

"You're very kind, Mr. Kelly, I sure do appreciate all you've done for me. I could run 'em off home, as you say, and be safe there. I don't want you to think I'm ungrateful when I fail to take advantage of the openin' to do it."

"What?" said Kelly in amazement. "You mean you'll not drive 'em on, now they're out of the Kansas court's jurisdiction? Say! what kind of a man are you? Let me take a look at the color of your eyes."

Tom swung his horse around and rode forward, halting his animal neck to neck with Jim's, giving Kelly as direct and open a chance for investigation into the color of his eyes, and spirit that lay behind them, as any man ever had. What Jim Kelly saw made his tanned face turn a smoky white, and his breath catch in the middle of his throat.

"Mr. Kelly, you've befriended me, you've done me as noble a service as one man ever set his hand to do for another. Say no more."

"All right," Jim returned, distant and cold. "They're down there; take 'em or leave 'em. Call them boys off," he directed his man, "and go on back to work."

Maud pressed forward between her brother and Laylander, fighting mad over this apparent flouting of friendship, as well as what she took to be a cowardly surrender of an opportunity that daring service had put into the unworthy Texan's hands.

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 explain that God intends doing things by an eternal intention—which, as we said, is an innovation—they have put it down that the universe is created. Then they are asked how can a created thing come from an eternal intention. They answer that the eternal intention became connected with the action at the time of the creation especially, and that is the time in which the universe was made. Then they may be asked, that if the relation of the intending Creator towards the created thing at the time of its nonexistence be the same as at the time of its creation, then that created thing is by no means better than the other thing, when at the time of its making, the action which was not found in its non-existence is not connected with it. If the relation be different then there must necessarily be a created intention otherwise the created result of an action would come from an eternal action, for what is necessary of it in action, is necessary also in intention. If it be said


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 "Mr. Laylander, may I ask you what you intend to do with them cattle?" Maud demanded.

"I'm goin' to deliver them back into the sheriff's hands, Miss Maud."

"The hell you are!" said Jim.

"I thought I was helpin' a man!" said Maud, her fury mounting. She rode nearer, shaking her quirt so near Laylander's face that he drew back, blinking his white-lashed eyes. "You're not a man, you're nothing but a big, empty bluff. You've not got sense enough to shut your fist on a stick of candy when somebody puts it in your hand!"

"There they are," said Jim, stretching out his long arm toward the cattle. "Take 'em and go to hell!"

Jim rode away to join his men, leaving Maud in her fury and Louise in her shame, to confront Laylander and arraign him as Jim felt that he deserved.

"Surely you're not in earnest, Tom. You're not going to drive them back to Kansas?" Louise pleaded.

"You wouldn't ask me to go on with them, Miss Louise," Tom replied, more of surprise than reproach in his soft voice.

"What else? I don't want to see you misled by a mistaken sense of honor to play into Cal Withers's hand again."

"Oh, let the darn fool go!" said Maud. ComeMaud. "Come [sic] on—let's get out of here."

She started her horse with a sharp lash, galloping off a little way, hauling up to wait for Louise.

"Don't you see how you've offended Mr. Kelly and

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