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 We can water just so many, and no more; we have to sell our increase every year."

"It looks to me like there ought to be some way to break that man's hold on that country," Rawlins reflected.

"To a man from the outside it may look that way, but put it up to anybody that lives in this State and he'll understand the why and the wherefore of it, as the widder woman said."

"I don't say it's a one-man job, but if all you sheepmen would move together, wipe that fence out of the way and march in, what is there to stop you?"

"Galloway'd have the United States marshal down here with a hundred deputies before you could say scat. It ain't a question of law or who's got the right, but a question of who's got the power and pull. If the United States marshal couldn't handle it, Galloway'd bring the army in. Let me tell you, boy, these sheepmen around here ain't no babies, but they're drivin' thirty-five to fifty miles around that fence to git to the post office at Lost Cabin from this neighborhood, and they've been doin' it a long time, when it's only twelve miles straight acrost. And every section line's dedicated and set aside by law as a public road. Why don't they open a public road straight acrost that land, then? Why don't a iron dog chase a rabbit!"

"I don't question the nerve of you sheepmen in here," Rawlins said, but with mental reservation. "Only I wondered."

"I've shot at men in my time, "and I've been shot at—and maybe hit in a little no-'count place here and

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 there—but I've always had some kind of a long chance on my side."

"The only hope seems to be in a new senator, then."

"Galloway's got a cast-iron cinch on the job. He'll be there till he dies, then I guess they'll put his son in after him. By that time they'll claim they've got a deed to that land, I reckon."

"You never can tell about politics. You sheepmen ought to be able to frame him—it would be worth trying, anyhow. Do you make your headquarters far from here, Mr. Clemmons?"

"This wagon's my house and home, has been for nine years. It looks older than that, but I bought it second-handed off of a sheepman that was quittin'. I guess it'll hold together to roll me out of here to the railroad when I decide I'm whipped."

"You don't depend on that little spring to furnish water for all those sheep, do you?"

"No; I've got me a couple of tanks up in the hills. Back in Newbrasky or Kansas you'd call 'em stock ponds. I can pull through this many sheep on the water I ketch in them tanks, but they wear down lean on account of the long drives I have to make."

"I was wondering how you watered them, grazing over the wide territory you must cover on the thin cropping there is around here. They'll not go more than two or three days without water, will they?"

"Back in the country where you come from they can't, but here they'll go five or six days easy enough, longer in a pinch if there's plenty of dew. They toughen to it. But it's a hard life, both for man and beast. I think sometimes the sheep must be glad when

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 they're shipped out to be butchered at the packin' houses. I can't see why any man wants to leave a country where corn grows to come out here."

"It's pretty well crowded back in that country. A man wants to have a place to put his feet down somewhere, with room enough to turn round. Land's high back in Kansas, too high for a man starting out to try to buy."

"Yes, a man's got a achin' in him for a home of some kind. That's what drives so many of them wanderin' and searchin', I reckon. Them home-seekers come through here right along, drivin' their batty old wagons with kids bulgin' out the canvas, lookin' for a place to light and put a plow in the ground. They've been kep' on the move from Git-out to Go-on, as the widder woman said, kicked out by the cowmen first, hustled on by the sheepmen next. Nobody in this country wants 'em.

"They come up here to Dry Wood with maps from the land office down at Jasper, hopin' they've found a place to unload them kids at last. Where they go from here, Lord knows. Over the mountains into the desert, I reckon, and keep a-goin' till they wear their tires out."

"If you sheepmen would lease a block of that country inside Galloway's fence I believe you'd have the key to the situation. The Government would be back of you then."

"We're agin leasin', in the first place. We've seen too much country hogged by the big fellers that way. Open range; that's sheep gospel. It's gettin' harder for us sheepmen up in this country every year, with the

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 Gover'ment settin' aside them mountains for forest reserves, some of 'em without a tree on 'em as high as your head for twenty miles. Second place, nobody's got pull enough to lease a single foot of that land Jim Galloway's got his fence around. It couldn't be done."

"It looks raw; it looks scandalously raw."

"You're right; it is. I'm just about edged off of the map, I tell you, mister. If some feller comes along here one of these days purty soon when the weather begins to dry up and wants a cheap job-lot of sheep, I'll be standin' on the top of the hill waitin' to grab his money."

"Maybe I'll take you up on that one of these days," Rawlins said, laughing a little, not to make it look too serious, or himself too foolish, in the dusty old flockmaster's eyes.

"Whenever you're in the notion," Clemmons replied.

It didn't seem so unreasonable, or such a remote possibility, to Rawlins as he sat with his back against the wagon wheel, looking out over the mysterious duskiness of the sheeplands, at peace under the near, bright stars. Somebody would break through that baronial fence one of these days. Perhaps fate, or fortune, or circumstance had plotted with him in all his building upon that mysterious white spot on the map, shaping and guiding his own hand to the task.

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was abroad again early next morning, traveling northward along the senatorial fence, his well-laid plan for beginning the foundation of his fortune thrown into chaos by this wire barrier shutting him from the land of his fervent calculations. Nothing in the corner of a sack would avail against that arbitrary boundary stretched across the frontier of the sheeplands, if the story told by shaggy old Al Clemmons was true.

Clemmons had come with him as far as the fence, which was not more than a mile from the old man's spring, pointing out to him from a hilltop the long line of posts diminishing down to dots in the level distance southward. To the north one could not follow the line so far, the land lying rough and unpromising in that direction.

The old sheepman said the best of the enclosed territory was in the northerly direction, in spite of the sterile and forbidding character it presented opposite his range. A few miles along, a considerable valley began, he said. A creek ran through this, making the paradise of pasturage and water for which the sheepmen of Dry Wood longed.

In that direction also, Clemmons informed the adventurer into Dry Wood, there were several important

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 flockmasters. He would find their ranches scattered, along a creek, the waters of which they had appropriated to their own selfish uses by homesteading, buying or stealing, every mile of land fronting upon the stream. Clemmons was an uncharitable man when considering the prosperity of other men in relation to his own.

This bitter intolerance was so evident in all the old man's discussion of other people's affairs, except those no better off than himself, that Rawlins parted from him with a slight renewal of his overwhelmed hopes. Perhaps the dusty old fellow was incapable of granting that a prosperous man could be an honest one, a prejudice common to the self-defeated and the malcontents wherever they are found. Investigation might reveal conditions in Dry Wood far different from what the old flockmaster represented them. In addition, there might be some selfish design behind all this talk of oppression and fencing of public land.

Rawlins continued northward, following the fence, his object being further exploration and investigation. One of the big sheepmen would be a more reliable source of information than Clemmons, whose yearly trip down to Jasper, with perhaps a visit to Lost Cabin every six months to replenish his supplies, gave him all the contact he had with the affairs of men. There was not much in a life of that kind, Rawlins reflected, isolated in dusty servitude to sheep. Instead of being a flockmaster, as he proudly believed himself, Clemmons was mastered by his flock. That was not the sort of sheepman Rawlins designed to be.

As Lost Cabin had been his primary objective, he

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 still considered continuing on to that place. It would be the community center of those widely separated ranches, the place where information might be secured relative to sheep and land. Not that anything he might learn there would alter the fact of Senator Galloway's fence. That was there, right beside him. It gave him a jolt, Rawlins admitted, to find it dividing him from that white spot on the map by which he had plotted his first scheme. But it was there, and the man who put it there had the power to keep it there, against the demands of thirsty flockmasters and home-seekers from afar.

Lost Cabin lay on the western boundary of this fenced domain, Clemmons had said, the way to the town from his location being almost fifty miles around. The town, having been there first, had been granted an outlet by the imperious land-eater, the flockmaster said. But the senator had run his barbed wire on three sides of it, leaving it sitting in an indenture on his western frontier.

Fine business, thought Rawlins, viewing the fence with growing indignation, to allow one man to grab and hold such a big fistful of the public domain.

The hour was early in the morning, the sun not more than a span from the hilltops, for Clemmons had roused his guest at dawn to share his coffee and bacon. A sheep-herder, the old man explained, must get his flock out while the dew was on the herbage. They would not leave the bedding-ground without the herder; they had been bred to a dependence upon man that seemed to deepen with each succeeding generation. Much more the old flockmaster had told the adven-

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 turer into Dry Wood, so much more, in fact, that Rawlins was beginning to think he was no fit guardian of sheep, knowing as little about their habits, and the rigors and peculiarities of that country, as he did.

Take a job with some big sheepman, Clemmons had advised. Stick to it two or three years, learning all he could in that time, before venturing his capital in a flock of his own. A man must go through two or three winters, and the exacting period of lambing, up night and day for days on end caring for the ewes and tender lambs, with the snow still on the ground and the bitter winds of early spring blowing, before he would be qualified to set up on his own responsibility.

Even if he had unlimited capital he stood to lose a great deal of it unless he knew the business from the start to the finish. Of course, a man could hire brains, the old man said, but it was a whole lot better to get a handful into one's own head that could be depended on in a pinch.

Good advice, disinterested advice, Rawlins knew. There was only one side to old Al Clemmons; that was as plain as the whiskers on his face. If he didn't like a man he could no more dissemble than a sheep could shear itself. It would be the wise thing, without a doubt, to hit some big sheepman for a job. A greenhorn was put out with an experienced herder, Clemmons had told him, until he learned the ways of sheep in a measure, and got acquainted with the dogs. The prospect took a good deal of the romance out of the plan of becoming a flockmaster, but it was sensible and sound.

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 For a simple, pastoral pursuit, as old as civilization, there seemed to be a great deal to learn about this business of growing sheep. In a fenced pasture, with bluegrass and clover, water and shade and a shed against the winter storms, it was simple enough; here on the wild grey range, so vast that a man caught his breath and flinched from it, as from his first step into the sea, it was a different matter.

Why, Rawlins said, with frank astonishment over his own ignorance, he never knew before that morning that lambs' tails must be cut off—Clemmons said some sheepmen bit them off as they went about after the yeaning ewes—to keep them from matting up with burrs and sand and dragging upon the animals, a fatiguing, useless weight.

Perhaps it was just as well that he had run against that fence, stretching there from horizon to horizon between him and the unimproved white waste on the map. It might prove the first check in the precipitate dash of ignorance, saving him an inglorious fall in the end. Senator Galloway could not hold that land always; public pressure would remove his fence in time, probably soon enough for Rawlins' purpose. Meanwhile, nobody else could take up the land. When the lessons of sheep had been learned, maybe the fence would be down. Then a homestead on some creek, and a band of his own to range, with alfalfa growing to carry the sheep over winter hardships when the range was under snow or sleet.

The vision broadened out of the obscurity of first disappointment as Rawlins followed the fence up hill and down, holding his way toward the north.

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 One thing about it was certain: the pressure of haste was gone out of the adventure. The fence across the frontier of his great white spot had put a new aspect on the entire proceeding for Rawlins. Time was no longer the essence of that business.

He proceeded on his way leisurely, his intention of becoming a flockmaster in no way altered, although the means to that end had undergone a sharp revision overnight. His dollar watch told him it was eight o'clock, near enough to the correct time for all pur-: poses in a country where hours and miles were alike insignificant in the broad pattern of men's lives, when he brought up on a hilltop to project his inquiring gaze over grey slope and green vale for the ranches the sheepman had told him would be found in that direction.

Nothing in the shape of man's habitation was in sight. Except for the fence, the country appeared as empty as on the day it was finished and left there for the solemn sage to cover with its charity, the spiked soapweed to rear its forbidding spears among. Rawlins wondered if the fence-riders would object if he cut across the senator's ranch to strike Lost Cabin, which place Clemmons had told him could be seen from a high hill a little way north of his range.

Concluding that no grounds for opposing a peaceful trespass could be advanced by the guards, chancing that he might run across any of them, Rawlins decided to risk the encounter when he came to the hill from which he could lay his course.

Rawlins got his first understanding of what a sheepman meant by a "little ways" that morning. Clem-

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 mons had said it was only a "little ways" to the prominent hill from which the hamlet of Lost Cabin could be seen across the twelve or fifteen miles of Galloway's enclosure, which was narrow in that place owing to the indenture made in its opposite border by the town. Rawlins was certain he had traveled no less than fifteen miles when he hauled himself up to the hilltop about noon. He knew it was the hill Clemmons had meant, for the little white houses of Lost Cabin were as plain as dice on a table, almost due west of him.

If that was only a little way, spare him the long ways, Rawlins thought. From that he fell to speculating, sitting on top of the hill where the grass was green and promising, on the postulation that these unfilled reaches of the north-west had something in their very vastness that contributed to men's success there.

Men grew into the way of thinking in large terms in that country. Five hundred sheep were only a few, three thousand but a band. When a man spoke of a flock, he meant thirty thousand, fifty thousand. Thinking in big terms was followed by planning and doing in big terms. The country was responsible for it, more than the men themselves. That would account for some of the dumb-looking flockmasters he had met at the stockyards. The country had laid hold of them, mediocre seed dropped in its fecund soil, and turned out prodigious growths which might have been only stunted starvelings in another clime.

Nature had cleared the air for human enlargement there; man's field of vision was almost painfully enlarged. His hitherto valued possessions, accomplish-

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 ments, ambitions, became dwarfed in the immensity that mocked them. He was so suddenly revealed to himself in his insignificance that he was ashamed of the small things of the past, and began moving his feet at once to keep pace with the sudden enlargement of his horizon. Nature simply took hold of him and stretched a pigmy into a giant.

It was easier to understand Senator Galloway's fence in the light of this revelation. The man had grown so big through his mere association that he had enlarged to fit his environment. Hundreds of square miles under one unbroken fence did not seem extraordinary to him; the fact that it was not his land, nothing to trouble his conscience. A man naturally hardened as he broadened and grew immense.

That might explain the fencing-in of the public lands, but it did not justify it in any degree. In the vast territory held without warrant of leasehold or contract of any kind, hundreds of homeless families might find lodgment from their wandering quest. Rawlins pictured them as Clemmons had described them, driving on in eager hope, expecting to find this land open to homestead entry, only to bring up against that insolent fence like tumble weeds before the wind. Tumble weeds, uprooted by the winds of adversity from the soil in which they had grown, destined never to take root again.

So Rawlins rested there in the warm sun of noonday, his thoughts passing from one phase of speculation to another, imagination quickened by the strangeness of all that spread around him, and out of the distance one came riding across the fenced lands from the

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 direction of Lost Cabin, horse and rider appearing no bigger than a fly.

There was new interest in this movement in the landscape. Imagination, conjecture, leaped across the two or three miles—perhaps more—that lay between, to fix upon the rider, now seen, now lost, as he came on over hill and swale.

The rider seemed to be holding a direct course for the hill on which Rawlins sat. If he had been one of Galloway's fence-riders coming to warn the stranger away from that forbidden territory he could not have ridden a straighter line. Coming right for him, Rawlins thought, feeling a little queer, just as if his telescopic eye had revealed the stranger to him as he rode the fence miles away on the other border.

Rawlins felt the absurdity of such a thought, even while the premonitory crinkling of something like the advance breath of trouble ran through him. He had a feeling of undue prominence on that hill. He felt it was time to be getting on his way.

Down through a tangle of unfamiliar shrubs, which grew ranker on the north side of the hills than the south, Rawlins hastened toward the fence, curious to get a closer sight of the rider. Clemmons had given the fence-guards a hard name. It would be interesting to see whether a man so employed in the service of oppression would carry the arrogance of his delegated authority in his face.

Green greasewood stood high among the grey sage at the foot of the hill, so rank and thick the fence was hidden. Rawlins pushed along through it, breaking out suddenly into a promising little glade, which the

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 view from the height had indicated, rather than revealed. Here he came across the first proof that Galloway's fence was not accepted passively by all whom it barred.

Somebody had cut the fence. The ground was marked here by a horse's tracks, seeming to indicate to Rawlins' eye, not unpracticed in such things, that the rider had leaned from the saddle to snip the wires. The trespasser had ridden into the forbidden lands with a bound, deep hoof-prints showing where the animal had leaped under the spur. Now he was returning after his defiant excursion, the hill his landmark, heading for the cut in the fence like a bee to its tree.

Rawlins stood grinning beside the gap in the wires, taking a great satisfaction in the sight, feeling friendly and partisan toward the daring fellow who had made the breach to save himself a ride of thirty-five or forty miles. He would wait there until the rider arrived, pounding headlong for the hole in the fence, and give him greeting, with a word of endorsement, as he passed.

At that moment the interest of the situation began to increase. Somebody else was coming along inside the fence, descending the flank of the hill which Rawlins had come down. Rawlins could not see this rider, the bushy growth being high and thick along there, but he could hear the horse picking its way carefully down the steep slope, the rustle of its passing through the bushes, the noise of dislodged, stones. Easy enough to piece out the shaping comedy, or tragedy, or what

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 it might prove to be. A fence-rider had discovered the cut, and seen the trespasser heading back for it.

Rawlins was keen to hear what might pass between the two, but doubted the wisdom of being present in the character of innocent bystander, upon whom the bitterest blow of public altercations too often lands. He withdrew rapidly and discreetly behind a tall clump of bushes about a rod from the opening, palpitant in his suspense and expectation, just as the fence-rider appeared.

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was nothing startling in the aspect of Senator Galloway's patrolman. Rawlins had consorted with dozens of his type in cow camps on the Kansas plains, lined up with scores of them at the long bars of the stockyards' saloons. He came riding out of the bushes with stealthy precision, his horse restrained by careful hand, reins held high above the saddle-horn, free and untrammeled in his dark-blue woolen shirt, coat and slicker behind the saddle, rifle in scabbard under the bend of his knee.

Rawlins watched the fence-rider from his covert as he drew his horse up across the cut panel of wire, near enough to him to see that he had left his youth behind him by at least twenty years. His face was thin, his features were prominent, with a look of inflexibility and determination about him that did not promise well for the trespasser. Rawlins concluded from his neat appearance that his camp was not far away.

The fence-rider waited, horse blocking the gap in the fence, something of injured innocence in his bearing, conveying the impression that it was his fence which had been abused, and he had suffered a deep insult along with it. He glanced at the wire-ends which lay in the dust beside him, the lean muscles of his jaws bunching as he chewed hard on something that prob-

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 ably was not gum. It looked like a bad hour for the man who cut the fence, Rawlins thought, and with the thought the person in question burst suddenly into view on top of a little rise not more than twenty yards away.

The person who had ridden across the forbidden territory, desecrating the sacred institution of a fence to do so, appeared on the crest of the little rise under such headway that it was impossible to bring the horse up sharply and cut it for safety away from the sentinel who blocked the exit. Some effort was made to check the horse's plunge down the rather abrupt little hillside, which was not effective until the bottom had been reached.

There the rider swung round as if to give the fence-guard a run for it, no doubt with the design of cutting the fence farther along and escaping from the trap. Not until that moment, horse and rider presenting side view, had Rawlins seen, or even suspected, that the bold trespasser on Senator Galloway's usurped pastures was a woman.

Whether she considered a race on her winded horse against the fresh one of the guard lost before it was begun, or whether it was against her code to turn her back to a foe, Rawlins could do no more than guess as she turned her mount with decisive hand and faced again toward the fence. Rawlins had a pretty good notion that the latter condition was the one which moved her, basing his belief on the defiance proclaimed in every line of her body, from her sombrero-covered head to her spurred boots.

The fence-rider sat waiting her arrival, his lean jaws bunching in hard little knots at the hinges as he bit

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 determinedly on whatever it was between his teeth. It might be a piece of his own barbed-wire fence, from the grimness of his face.

The horse came forward at a walk, it being of that distinctive cow-country breed and training that knows no intermediate gait between its fastest and slowest. The beast had been pushed hard; its long winter coat, giving way in ragged patches here and there, was drenched with sweat as if it had forded a river. The fence-rider stiffened for action as the trespasser drew near, lifting himself in his stirrups as if all set for a race or a row. Rawlins wondered what he would do if she ignored him and tried to ride past.

She was not an uncomely girl—a closer view discovered that she was scarcely more, nineteen or twenty, Rawlins judged—in spite of her broad hat with leather band, her riding breeches and man's coat, knee boots which bore the mark of many a scramble over rough ground and through thorny bushes. Her hair was completely hidden under the hat, jammed down at an angle which appeared most uncomfortable, as it was most unbecoming, on the back of her head. It had the advantage of revealing her face, however, for which Rawlins was pleased, for he had done some tall figuring since he discovered her sex, trying to form an advance picture of a lady who had the temerity to cut a fence guarded by rough-handed men and ride on her business across the interdicted miles.

It was refreshing to find her better than his mental artistry had devised. That added to the interest of the situation. It would be easier to deny a plain girl passage than a handsome one. At least

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 Rawlins knew it would be so in his case if he stood in the fence-rider's place.

The fence-rider's horse was squared around to stand broadside across the cut panel, which it filled almost completely, the posts standing not more than twelve feet apart, leaving no room for passing without a clash. The girl rode up slowly, her blown horse carrying its head dispiritedly, showing no interest in the stranger of its own kind. Rawlins noticed with quickening of anticipation that the girl was gathering her reins with surreptitious movement as she held the fence-rider in her eye. His heart gave a jump with her horse as she roused it from its listless plodding with a touch of the spurs.

It was what Rawlins had expected of her, seeing her come up in that apparently disciplined, defeated way. But her sly trick failed; the fence-rider was expecting it, also. He whirled his horse to meet her charge, which she had begun with no more than a rod between them, catching her horse's neck across the withers of his own, grasping her reins with quick and certain hand.

In the dust of the compact the man leaned out, one leg crooked up, the stirrup on his toe, jerking the bit, setting her horse back on its rump, giving her a busy moment to hold her seat.

"What a' you doin'? What a' you doin'?" he asked, a jerk on the bit with each explosive demand, which was more censorious than interrogative. "Don't you know this ain't no road?"

The girl's horse scrambled up, backing off, dodging, trying to break its captor's hold, succeeding only in

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 stirring the fellow's anger against it, which he relieved in cuffs and curses, as he might have misused a man.

"Where do you think you're goin' to?" he asked the girl, red to the gills, furious in his mounting anger, which his abuse of the horse appeared to rouse to sudden heat.

The girl was pulling at the reins, which she had twisted around her hand. Between the two of them the horse was having an unhappy time, pitching and lunging, sidling and twisting, its mouth dribbling the foam of torture. Rawlins was so engrossed in the struggle that he forgot his place as a neutral, leaving his concealment, drawing near to see the outcome. Neither of the parties to the squabble saw him, although he had come to the fence in his eagerness.

"Let go that bridle!" said the girl, panting in a white fury that was the hotter for its helplessness.

"No, I'll not let go! No, I'll not let go!" the fence-rider declared. "What a' you doin' inside of this fence—say?"

He fired that at her several times, yanking the bridle savagely, fingers through the ring of the bit, repeating himself explosively.

"Take your dirty hands off my horse and let me go!" the girl demanded, giving up her struggle to break loose out of consideration for her horse.

"This ain't the first time you've cut this fence!" the guard accused.

He left off jerking the horse to lean over and jaw at her, making a menace with his free hand.

"That ain't half of it," she returned, as defiant as he was angry.

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 "You'll think a long time before you cut another waar," he threatened. "You're not goin' through this gap—you hear me? You're goin' to turn that horse around and ride ahead of me acrost this past'r out the 'way you come in on the other side. You'll go around this fence, you darn little forkid streak of devilment!"

Rawlins went a little nearer. He noted that the girl had no defensive weapon about her, nothing at all but a little buckskin bag at the horn of her saddle, a gunnysack behind her with something lumpy, like groceries, in it. It would be a shame, he thought, to allow that ruffian to send her back. She would hardly be able to make it home that day, considering the long ride around the fence. He was thinking he'd have to throw in a word or two when she flung her leg over the saddle and flipped to the ground.

"I'll not go; you can't make me go!" she said.

"All right," the fence-rider replied, accepting the situation coldly: "It'll cost you your horse and saddle for cuttin' this fence to-day, and next time it'll cost you more. You can take them things off. I don't want your grub."

"You're not going to take that horse!"

"Ain't I? You watch me."

"You'll not dare to steal my horse!" she said, but with trembling, doubtful voice, clutching the bridle opposite the fence-rider's hold with both hands, looking up at him with more of appeal than threat in her pale face.

"You can git me arrested," he suggested, insolent in his certainty of security.

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 "You'll never dare to ride this fence again if you take that horse!" she said.

"I'll give you leave at me," he derided. "I'll be right along here to-morrow. Take them things off of that saddle if you want 'em."

"You'll not dare—you'll not let him take my horse, will you?" she appealed, catching sight of Rawlins, her voice quick with new hope.

The fence-rider was at a disadvantage, left hand wound in the reins of the captured horse, his back to the stranger, whom he glimpsed in one quick flash of his eyes around, but he was a fellow who had one kind of argument for a woman, another for a man. His hand was on his rifle; he had it half-way out of the scabbard when Rawlins caught his arm, wrenching the gun away from him.

"No call for a break like that," Rawlins reproved him.

"Who asked you to horn in?" the fence-rider wanted to know. "Who in the Billy Hell are you?"

"I guess it don't matter. You heard what the lady said. Let go of that horse and make yourself scarce around here!"

The fence-rider swept the stranger with an appraising eye, noting his calmness, the way he held the gun, and the general bearing of inflexibility that put up the bars to further argument.

"I guess you're the doctor, pardner," he said.

Rawlins waved his hand in a general direction of Lost Cabin, indicating the fence-rider's business just then lay in that quarter, but said no more. There was

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 nothing more to be said, indeed. It was a case of put up or shut up.

The girl gave a little sobbing gasp of relief when the fence-rider galloped off as suddenly as if the gun had been fired for the start of a race that he was determined to win. She looked at Rawlins, her lips puckered in a tremulous struggle that seemed indecisive between a grin and a sob, dragged her sleeve almost viciously across her eyes, hiding her face a moment in the crook of her arm. There was a little sniveling sound, a little agitation of quick-caught sobs in her bosom. She faced him, then, smiling, tears in her eyes.

"Darn him!" she said.

"He's a rough sort of a guy, ain't he?" Rawlins said, looking after the man as he mounted the hill she had ridden down a little while before, passed over it in a flash, and out of sight.

"He'd 'a' stole my horse, all right, if you hadn't happened along."

"I don't see how he could get away with anything like that," Rawlins remarked. "I think it was a bluff to scare you off. More than likely he intended to turn it loose in a little while."

"No, he didn't," she corrected him seriously. "He'd 'a' got out of it—they can get out of anything."

"You ought to carry a gun, it seems to me, when you go out fence-cutting."

"Yes, I know I ought to," she admitted, "but I didn't want them to have anything on me. They can't do anything to you by law, I mean, for cuttin' the fence on a section line—that's a public road, you know—but if you go in with a gun on you and happen to

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 take a shot at one of them, they'd send you over the road."

"That's only a bluff. They haven't got any more rights inside the fence than they have outside."

"I don't know," shaking her head doubtfully. "They make everybody think they have, anyhow. Are you from the land office?"

"No; I'm a stranger here."

"Well, I'm darn glad you happened along, anyhow." She breathed out a big sigh of relief, looking at him gratefully. "We'd better go away from here—that fence-rider'll double back if he meets another one, and from the way he started off I think he had hopes. What are you going to do with his gun?"

"Leave it here. I don't want it."

"I think you'd better hold on to it till we leave the fence. You can stand it against a post, he'll find it."

She led her horse through the fence, refusing his offer to help her to the saddle, saying she would walk along with him if he was going her way. If that way led over to the settlements on the creek, he said. Sure; their ranch was the first one, about two miles east. She'd be glad to have him stop for dinner.

As they walked along the fence she explained her reason for coming to that spot to make a breach in the wire.

"I generally cut it along here, because I can see this hill from a good ways off when I'm comin' back. If there's anybody snoopin' around I come in below here and cut my way out in another place. That man's laid for me a long time, but he never caught me before to-day. I guess I'll have to go around after this."

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 "An old sheepman named Clemmons told me about the way this fence cut you folks around here off from Lost Cabin," Rawlins said. "I never heard of it before last night."

"It's been here a long time, but nobody ever cuts it but me. Well, once a man cut it in the night to go after the doctor, but they threw such a scare into him I guess he'd let the whole family die before he'd do it again."

Her adventure with the fence-rider did not appear to trouble her very deeply, now she was out of it. She was more interested in the appearance of a stranger of such unusual type in the sheeplands. As Rawlins was in that country to know and be known, he made short work of unfolding his plans and intentions, feeling himself very well rewarded for his confidence when she told him she belonged to a sheep family, and that she would be glad to help him in any way she could.

Close-mouthed and wary, in the true sheepman fashion, she closed up on her personal affairs with that, not even revealing her name, nor showing any curiosity about his. Rawlins leaned the rifle against a post at the point where she said their way turned off from the fence, marching along beside her down into the valley of a little stream that came winding out of the north over a stone-broken course.

Rawlins wanted her to ride, which she refused to do, saying she welcomed the chance to get out of the saddle and stretch her legs, which particulars of her anatomy she mentioned with frankness as ingenuous as their proportions were plain to the eye in her mannish garb. She passed the bridle-reins over her arm and took her

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 ARRANGEMENT OF SECTIONS A


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 hat off to wind up her hair, which seemed to be coming down, although not a strand of it was to be seen before she revealed it by this sudden uncovering.

There was plenty of it, braided and wound in the German way about the head, light and fine, harmonizing with her fair skin and blue eyes. Her femininity was enhanced greatly by the simple removal of her hat, her comeliness established beyond a doubt. She stood somewhat above the height of romance, her newly-wound top-knot but a few inches short of Rawlins' own crown as he trudged beside her taking inventory of her sheepland charms.

She did not have the appearance of one who lived in a sheep wagon, or followed the flocks over the hills, as Clemmons had told him many sheep families did in that neighborhood of small flockmasters. While she slammed around somewhat carelessly with her words, there was an edging of a better understanding in her manner. She had not spent all her time on the sequestered ranch at the mountain creekside, Rawlins was very sure.

Sequestered ranch was about the name for it, he thought, as they wormed along the trail beside the crooked stream, its bright clear water making a rumpus among the stones, the red-barked willows along its course showing a little dressing of green leaves and pendant blooms.

They burst upon the ranch at once, with no preliminary hint of its nearness, not even in the broadening of the trail as much as the breadth of a hand. A comfortable, snug place it was, a low log house, long and commodious, with a jutting wing, a veranda between.

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 There were folds and shelters of various kinds in the background, and sheep pens enclosed by a wattled fence that must have been an effective windbreak in winter storms. There was a patch of alfalfa, green as a daub in some crude painting, a brown spot where corn and cabbage stalks marked last summer's garden, a little orchard whose trees leaned as if to lie down out of the rigors of that bare, wind-trampled land.

An irrigation ditch, having its source up the stream at some point out of sight, carried the water for these domestic enterprises. It ran brimful in the bright spring sun to-day, a fringe of springing grass, of green that almost paled the vivid alfalfa, along its brink. There was a wire fence enclosing house and grounds, with a gate that one could open from the saddle by a lever. Bits of wool clung to the barbs of the fence, where incautious grazers had pressed too close. A lilac bush stood in the otherwise bare dooryard, its fat buds swelling to burst.

"This is home," the girl said, pausing, turning to him, throwing out her hand in a gesture of revelation and presentation, as if she offered it all, just as it stood. "You're welcome to it, such as it is, Mr ?"

"Rawlins, of Kansas."

"I am Edith Stone. I live here with my aunt, Mrs. Duke. We run the ranch. Come on in and meet her."

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, widow of a good sheepman, was a large red lady with a double chin. Her sleek black hair was rolled into a little wisp with a protruding end at the nape of her neck; her sharp black eyes were shadowed by a hedge of heavy black eyebrows which came together end-on at the bridge of her nose. She appeared to be inflamed to the sweating point, red and moist as if she fed mainly on peppers and fat mutton stew. But she was a surprisingly nimble woman on her feet, with a hearty voice that must have carried from hill to hill like a hunting horn, and a ready laugh lying always in the curl of her tongue.

Mrs. Duke was Edith Stone's maternal aunt. She had been made a widow by the little creek that ran before the ranch-house door. Duke had attempted wading it during a spring freshet; the current had flattened him against a boulder and held him until he drowned. His picture was on the wall of the sitting-room, showing him to have been a neutral sort of force, a curve in his face as if something had been put down on him when he was very young. Not unlike a ram in expression, no collar to his large-breasted white shirt. Rawlins was thankful, looking at the portrait in air-brush and crayon, that Edith Stone had not

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 come from Duke's side of the fence. For the young lady's sake, of course.

They did not explain to Rawlins the status of the concern, whether they were partners in the business, or whether Edith was merely a ward of her relative, making her home there pending the coming of better fortune. Mrs. Duke was a sheep-wise woman, shrewd, inquisitive, quick to find out about another's affairs while saying nothing at all of her own that an assessor or tax collector could profit by.

It did not require long for her to come to the bottom of Rawlins' aims and intentions, for he had nothing to reserve or hide.

"Yes, I can tell just about how you felt when you run up against that fence," she said with friendly sympathy. "I guess it was about the same as if somebody you trusted and depended on had gone back on you at the last minute, leavin' you holdin' the sack."

"Just about like that," Rawlins admitted. "I couldn't conceive, and I can't yet, how one man could sprawl out over a chunk of country as big as that, with a lot of high-minded free American citizens around the edges afraid to lay a hand on his unlawful fence."

"You've seen how he does it, you know now. We'd 'a' been out a good horse and saddle if you hadn't happened to be at that gap in the fence this morning. We might 'a' lawed 'em till we couldn't stand up without ever gittin' hide or hair of that horse back. Senator Galloway owns the law up in this part of the country, except a few offices over at Lost Cabin. They're sore on him there because he strung his fence around the town and cut off its future, they say. It

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 the difficulty does not tend to pure intonation on the part of the players. Personally I venture to think that much of the charm of the flutesuch as we find in the works of the earlier mastersis lost in these whirlwinds of notes and dazzling chromatic scales. Perhaps, however, the composer does not intend that all the notes should be accurately played; possibly he shares the views of Sir Arthur Sullivan, who once at a rehearsal of his Golden Legend, when the 'cellos complained of the great difficulty of their part in the introduction depicting the storm, replied, "Oh, I never expected you to play all the notes of those chromatic scales, but merely to run your fingers up and down the strings so as to give the general effect." After all, it should never be forgotten that the flute is essentially a melodic instrument.

In the light of the passages written for the flute by these modern composers, the following directions given by Charles Avison in his Essay on Musical Expression, published in 1752, are somewhat amusing:

"In composing for the German flute is required the same method of proceeding by conjoint degrees, or such other natural intervals as, with the nature of its tone, will best express the languishing or melancholy style. With both oboe and flute, the running into extreme keys, the use of the staccato, or distinct separation of notes, and all irregular leaps or broken and uneven intervals must be avoided, for which reason alone these instruments ought never to be employed in the Repieno parts of Concertos for violins, but in such pieces only as are composed for them, and these perhaps would be most agreeably introduced as principal instruments in some interesting movements in the Concerto, which might not only give a pleasing variety, but show their different expression to the greatest advantage" (p. 95).


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 never had any more future than a graveyard. The little opposition to Galloway in that corner don't cut much ice when he can name all the other people that's to be elected or appointed, from federal judge down. It's a wonder they tell people down at the land office at Jasper there's any land open to entry in this part of the country at all."

Edith contributed little to the conversation during the meal, or afterwards as they conducted the stranger around the ranch, Mrs. Duke taking great pride, entirely justified, Rawlins thought, in the complete appointments of the place. Rawlins attributed the young woman's silence to the reaction from her unpleasant adventure, knowing that sensitive people suffer more in retrospection than in the moment of peril. She went along opening gates in a perfunctory, disinterested sort of way.

Edith had changed her garb for one more domestic and graceful, adding greatly to her native attractions, which Rawlins found refreshing as a flower in an unexpected place. She had taken the plaits out of her hair, which was wavy either from the crinkles of them or from a natural ripple, very pleasing to see, let it be due to nature or art. It was a shade darker than Rawlins had thought, with gleams and shadows in it as she moved, such as he used to watch in the ripening wheatfields from the window of his newspaper office out in the golden belt of Kansas.

"This is a hospital band," Mrs. Duke explained, stopping at a corral that contained two or three hundred sheep.

"Sick ones, eh?" said Rawlins, thinking how much

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 taller Edith appeared in that nice blue dress with its edging-around of red. A woman's clothes belonged to a woman, and a man's to a man.

"Under suspicion and observation, most of them," Mrs. Duke said. "The State veterinary he's watchin' us sheepmen like a hawk. Mighty good thing, too. He's afraid of scabies this spring. We're dippin', finished with 'em all as fast as we sheared, holdin' these till some of the cripples picks up a little. Over there's where we dip 'em. Ever see it done?"

"Millions of 'em," Rawlins replied recklessly, not meaning to deceive by making his figures so high, but carried off by a careless exhilaration that appeared to have taken hold of him.

"Thousands, I should say, I guess," he amended under Mrs. Duke's suddenly stern eyes. "I worked in the Kansas City stockyards, you know. Feeders have to be dipped before they ship 'em out—same kind of arrangement as you've got there, a chute full of dip that swims them, a man on the platform above to duck their heads under with a forked stick as they pass. Sure. Just the same."

"Well, I'm glad there's something you know about sheep," Mrs. Duke said drily, her inflection implying that he knew nothing at all. "If you ain't got anything better to do to-morrow you can help me dip that band. I want to get the hearty ones out on the range."

"I'll be glad to do it," Rawlins agreed so readily that Mrs. Duke's momentary displeasure was dispersed out of her broad red face.

"There's not enough dip in that trough for the

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 job," she calculated. "It's been 'vaporatin' away in the sun."

"I'll mix up some if you've got the ingredients," he offered, with the modest way of a man who knew his job.

"You can mix dip, can you?" She eyed him shrewdly, as if to penetrate his bluff. "Where did you learn at?"

"I put in four years at the best agricultural college in the world," he replied, not so much boastfully as with confident pride.

"Oh, you're one of them chemical farmers," apparently fully and satisfactorily enlightened now. "Well, I guess that helps, but I don't know how much. We used to have an old feller with us when Mr. Duke was alive, back on the farm in Iowa. He never had done a day's work of farmin' in his life before we took him in, but you couldn't mention anything to him he couldn't do. 'Sure I can,' he used to say, cheerful and bright; 'sure I can do it. I'm an old soldier.' I'm afraid you chemical farmers are a good deal like that old feller."

"The general public opinion agrees with you," Rawlins admitted, neither disposed to argue down her prejudices nor defend his qualifications.

"Runnin' a band of sheep on the range is the only way anybody can learn the business in this country, no difference what they teach in college. You seem to have sense enough to 'a' got that through your head already."

"Thanks," said Rawlins, turning to her with his

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 honest, ready grin. "It's something to know even a little bit of sense shows through."

"Them onery cowboys and cowmen throw the slur at us sheepmen that we ain't got the courage to come out and fight, just like there was only one kind of courage in this world, the kind that makes a man brawl and booze and yelp around a-straddle of a horse where gittin' away's easy. They hole up in the winter time, never showin' their noses outside the door when a blizzard hits the range, leavin' their stock to shift the best they can.

"When the blow's over they go out and see how many head they've lost, instead of headin' 'em around to some sheltered place the way a sheepman does. Hot or cold, snow or dry, you'll find a sheepman with his flock, takin' the weather the same as they take it, workin' 'em to some shelter in a storm if there's any to be reached."

"Yes, I've had other sheepmen tell me the same thing, Mrs. Duke."

"They say up here a handful of corn a day will carry a sheep through a blizzard and save its life. I've never had to try it, but I've got the corn, right there in that barn. I'd wade in snow up to my neck, forty below, to a band of blizzard-bound sheep. Show me a cowman that'd do as much for his starvin' herd. Oh, here and there you'll find one that'll drive out with a little jag of hay and pitch it off, tryin' to save enough cows to breed him another start, but there ain't many of 'em.

"If you'd 'a' been here two years ago you'd 'a' got a sight of what the cowmen's courage and common sense

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 and humanity amounts to. Over on the range west of Galloway's there was places along the cricks where you could 'a' walked on dead cattle and never put your foot on the ground for a mile at a stretch."

"I remember the big winter kill of that year," Rawlins said.

"It wasn't the winter killed them cattle as much as it was the improvidence and shiftlessness of the cowmen. You never heard of no big winter kill of sheep. We lose a lot of lambs sometimes, when a late storm catches the little things before they're hardly dry, but that ain't because the sheepmen and herders, and every mother's son and daughter of their fam'lies, ain't out in the weather workin' night and day to save the lambs. Maybe we ain't as brash as some onery yelpin' people about pullin' out a gun and shootin' some poor feller, but that's because we think more of other folkses' rights, and law and humanity."

"Sheep raisin' always has been the business of peaceable men," Rawlins remarked. "They never have been fighters, as far as sacred or profane history tells us. Abraham was a notable example of a sheepman, but he hasn't got much of a record with a gun."

"These cowmen say it takes the fight out of a man to live around with sheep, the peaceablest creatures in the world, I guess, and the most dependent on the care of humans. It'd do me good to see some sheepman take the conceit out of them fellers. I'd nearly give forty dollars to see some sheepman step out of the end of his wagon some night when them cowboys 're raidin' his band and knock a few of 'em stiff with a gun. It sure is the dose they need—not that they bother us

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 here any more. But I've seen the time right here in Dry Wood when they raided beddin'-grounds and burnt wagons and killed sheepmen and herders, right along. That's what'd happen to us now if we was to try to run our sheep on that fenced-up range."

"I wonder if it would?" Rawlins speculated, his thoughts with his eyes, it seemed, where they sought the low hilltops to the west, beyond which the forbidden country could not be espied.

"If I was a man, with all to make and little to risk, I'd go in there and homestead," Mrs. Duke declared. "Well, I may do it anyhow one of these days—I've never used my homestead right, Uncle Sam owes me a hundred and sixty acres of farmin' land, or a half-section of grazin', I think that's all called grazin' in there, but some of it's as good farmin' land as ever laid out of doors. I'd locate on the crick, four or five miles west of the fence, if I was goin' in. There's some mighty purty land in there, level and rich, only needin' water to grow any kind of grain but corn. Corn don't do no good up here; the seasons 're too short."

"Clemmons was telling me about that valley last night. He says it's easy to irrigate, plenty of water available. It looks to me as if a few determined homesteaders could go in there and hold their own against Galloway."

"I ain't hopeful of ever seein' it done," she sighed, shaking her head. "You'd better change your clothes before you mix that dip, it's a mussy job, and smelly stuff to splash on a person. If them's the worst you've got I guess I can lend you a pair of overhauls. Ain't that a purty buck? He's a registered Rambouillet. I

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 imported him last fall; he cost me seven hundred dollars put down at Jasper."

Edith had been standing off a little way beside the corral gate while they talked, as if she had no interest at all in the sheep, sick or well. She was pensive and preoccupied; Rawlins wondered what her thoughts might be. Perhaps she was tired of that place; longing to be away among people and scenes she had known, her heart wandering off up the wagon trail that came down the other side of the creek, upon which her eyes were fixed.

Three horses were sunning themselves dreamily in a corral; a few hens wallowed like indolent odalisques in the warm grey dust. These, with the sheep, were the only creatures about the place. In the sheeplands fashion, such milk as was used on that ranch came out of a tin, along with many other necessities and delicacies of the table.

Whether she owned a thousand or ten thousand sheep, Mrs. Duke did not say. She was silent likewise on the number of men she employed, and whether she gained or lost in the business. Yes, she said, in reply to Rawlins' question, she guessed a man could do right well if he had a ranch he could irrigate and grow alfalfa to sell to the sheepmen around there. It took a farmer to do that, not a sheepman. Sheepmen were against farming. It cut up the range.

Fine place, fine location, fine breed of sheep, said Rawlins, looking around approvingly. How long had she been there? Longer than she cared to tell, Mrs. Duke replied, considering that it might give away her age. She laughed it off, turning the talk to something

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 else. Rawlins wondered if she counted her money with one eye shut to keep the other from seeing how much she had, her sheepman-caution seemed so preposterously extreme.

"So you come out here to this country with it all planned out to be a sheepman?" Mrs. Duke said, as they rejoined Edith and walked slowly toward the house. "It's a shame that fence of Galloway's was in your way, but maybe it saved you time and money, after all."

"That's what I concluded after talking with Clemmons," Rawlins admitted.

"It'll not always be there in people's way," Edith said, with positiveness that seemed portentous. "A man will come along here one of these days big enough to make Galloway move his fence—or he'll move it for him."

"Somebody you've been writin' to?" Mrs. Duke suggested, letting Rawlins into the joke by a sly, slow wink.

Edith made no answer to this banter, although she flushed and turned her head as if resenting the introduction of a stranger into her private affairs. Mrs. Duke was not sensitive in the matter at all, nor conscious of any reservation of delicacy.

"That's what took her to the post office this morning, riskin' her neck cuttin' that fence," she said.

"Oh, Aunt Lila! You know we were out of coffee."

"She's got a mail-order beau, away back in Saint Joe, Missouri. She never set eyes on him in her life," Mrs. Duke continued in unfeeling revelation of the family secret, as much to Rawlins' distaste as to the girl's.

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 "Spare him the details, Aunt Lila," Edith pleaded, attempting a lightness which it was plain she did not feel.

"He's a tailor, he's got a moustache a foot long—she's got his picture propped up on her dresser."

"Oh, Aunt Lila!"

"Ain't it so? Sure it's so. Never saw him in her life, met him in an advertisement. Mail-order beau, I call him."

Mrs. Duke laughed, either unconscious or careless of the embarrassment her raillery caused the young woman. Rawlins glanced at Edith, trying to express sympathy, and his apology for the unavoidable part he had taken in her discomfiture. She grinned, but it was a costly effort, her face looking worried, even anxious, he thought, out of all proportion to the gravity of the case.

Mrs. Duke must keep her eye on the mixing and dilution of the sheep dip, not entirely convinced of the chemical farmer's ability to do all he claimed. When she discovered him fully experienced in the niceties of the compound she grew quite friendly and confidential, for a sheepman, as she invariably called herself, almost ready, it appeared, to accept him into the fraternity.

When Rawlins applied the sheep-shears, with expedition and success, to the coats of several ewes which had, by reason of their invalid condition at shearing-time, escaped the general denudation, she began to watch him out of the corner of her eye, and to question him shrewdly, sometimes cryptically. She suspected he was more than he represented himself to be, not willing to

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 accept his explanation that shearing was part of the curriculum in the college which gave him his degree.

The mistress of the flock was so pleased with her visitor's dexterity as he worked over a forlorn and chastened-looking ewe between his knees, that she called Edith from the house to witness this almost unbelievable thing. Edith appeared at her loud whoop, suddenly, with a look of consternation.

"Look at him—look at that chemical farmer shearin' a sheep!"

Mrs. Duke offered the spectacle proudly, as if all credit for-this small accomplishment in animal husbandry belonged to her alone. One might have thought she had given the young man his first lesson but a minute before, and he had surpassed his instructor after the first six strokes.

"Oh, I thought the place was afire!" said Edith, neither electrified nor surprised.

"But look at him—just look at him!" Mrs. Duke insisted. "He can shear a sheep dang near as good as I can."

"Why, of course, Aunt Lila. I knew he could all the time."

"He's a natural-born sheepman. That's what that boy is."

"Maybe he is," Edith allowed indifferently, her interest apparently hard to move and harder to hold. She was gazing up the road again, a look of worriment in her eyes.

The object of their discussion was the width of the corral distant, operating in the door of a shed, a wool-sack hanging beside him into which he tossed the fleece,

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 which he had removed like a good shearer, all in one piece. He held the ewe's head between his knees while he marked with brush and paint a big black D on its side, Mrs. Duke nodding approval, her bare arms on the fence.

Rawlins came across the lot for further instructions. A wagon was coming down the road at a brisk pace, having that moment broken into view around the turn, a cloud of dust rising high in the still air behind it. The two women had turned to watch the approach of the wagon, travelers on that road being few.

"That's a livery rig from Lost Cabin," Mrs. Duke said in surprise. "Ain't that Smith Phogenphole drivin'?"

"Yes," said Edith weakly.

"I wonder where he's takin' that man? It can't be a wool-buyer around this late. Why, they're turnin' in here!"

The stout spring wagon was bouncing and jolting across the rocky ford of the little stream, the deepest of its water not more than up to the hubs, the passenger clinging desperately to the seat. The vehicle struck dry land with a lurch, nearly pitching the passenger out on the horses' backs. The driver made a sudden clutch for the man's coat and hauled him back, laughing loudly.

Mrs. Duke confronted her niece with open mouth and staring eyes.

"Edith Stone! That's him!" she said. "I'd know that moustache in a million. That's him—that's your mail-order beau!"

"I didn't think he'd come," said Edith miserably,

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 looking around as if for some place to hide. "I got a letter this morning, he said he was coming, but I didn't think he'd have the nerve—nobody asked him to come. What in the world am I goin' to do?"

"That's what you've been watchin' that road so anxious for, is it? Well, he's here."

"Yes, darn him!" said Edith, vexed to her wits' end. "What am I goin' to do with him? That's what I want to know."

"Why, marry him," Mrs. Duke replied with easy conclusion. "You've got to marry some time, you might as well begin right now."

"Marry him?" Edith repeated in shocked surprise. "Why, I never had the slightest idea of marrying him! Mr. Rawlins"—in desperate appeal—"I only wrote to him for fun. I know you can understand how it was, Mr. Rawlins—I was so lonesome I'd 'a' corresponded with a dog!"

"Sure," said Rawlins cheerfully, immensely diverted by the situation, unprecedented in all his experience.

Edith was almost frantic. She stood there wringing her fingers, a look of humiliation, surprise and fright in her face that was truly moving. Mrs. Duke was answering the driver's waved salutations, which he now began to supplement by shouted hails, the sheepwoman giving them back to him as good as they came. The driver came on through the gate, rounded to and stopped.

The passenger got down from his uneasy seat, trying his legs tentatively with little bendings at the knees as if he had serious doubt of their working order after that rough ride. Mrs. Duke put her hand over her

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 mouth to mask her gaping astonishment, turning to her niece.

"He's seven foot tall and nine inches wide!" she marveled. "I never saw such a scissors-legged man in my life!"

"What made him come, what in the world made him come!" Edith lamented.

"Well, heaven above!" said Mrs. Duke. "After all your writin'! Come on and meet him and take care of him—don't expect to pa'm him off on me."

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, the mail-order beau, presented anything but a romantic appearance as he stood beside his luggage where the driver of the livery rig had unloaded him. He was a long, lean man, a peering inquisitiveness in his sharp features, adorned by a sprangling brown moustache, so long, so immense and so heavy, he appeared to carry his head to balance it, as a buck his spreading antlers. His nose was singularly juvenile, his light eyes were large, outstanding in their sockets, such a glassy brightness of artificialty in them as caused the beholder to wonder if he could see.

Peck carried his head thrust forward a little on his long, gaunt neck, as if to keep his moustache clear of entanglements. This pose, taken with the sharp angle of his neck that looked like something in a stocking, gave him the straining appearance of a horse stretching its neck to relieve the pressure of an uncomfortable collar. He was enveloped to the knees in a garment once popular with travelers from such places as St. Joe, known as a linen duster. Few of them were linen, Peck's being no exception. His was cambric of a greenish hue, wrinkled, drawn, drooping. It had large mussel-shell buttons, large packets of some weighty stuff in the pockets of it which contributed nothing to the engaging appearance a man might well desire to

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Patch

Novels

 * Patch (1936), a novel by Patrick J. Carroll
 * Patches (1928), a novel by Clarence Hawkes

Poems

 * "The Patch" (1723), a poem by various authors
 * "The Patch" (1922), a poem by Agnes K. Martyn

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 present when arriving on a tender mission such as his. A narrow-brimmed derby hat, pressed down hard to the eyebrows, topped off his extraordinary ensemble.

It required both hands to pry Peck loose from his hat, he had fixed it so firmly against the inequalities of the road. He had it off in due time to salute the ladies when they approached him, stepping out from his three pieces of luggage with great elegance, hair so well protected by the tortoise-shell hat that the plaster had not even cracked.

"So this is little old Edith!" he said. "Well, well, well!"

Edith was so embarrassed by this climax in her mail flirtation, together with the presence of Rawlins, whom Mrs. Duke had fairly brought forward by force, and the stage driver, who was hanging out over his seat in eagerness to hear, that she had no words ready for this ardent and familiar courtier. She gave him her hand, grinning ruefully, making the best of it she could.

Peck was not dampened by the reception, if sensible of its coolness, at all, which Rawlins doubted as he watched the forward fellow.

"And this is Missus Duke, natural as life and twice as big," Peck rattled ahead. "Give us a kiss, Aunt Lile."

"Well, I like your gall!" said Mrs. Duke, but not severely, not entirely displeased, although she did not offer her lips to the proposed salutation. She backed away, a capable hand raised to fend against the impetuosity of the man from St. Joe.

Smith Phogenphole, who plainly had possessed himself of the particulars of this romance along the way,

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 chuckled his appreciation of Peck's method. He appeared as a man whose doubts had been removed, comfortable in his enjoyment of the scene, keen in the anticipation of the stir his report would make when he got back to town.

"Come on into the house, Mr. Peck," Edith invited, more concerned about getting out of Smith Phogenphole's eyes than the matter of hospitality. "Grab your and come in."

She led the way, Mrs. Duke lingering for a chat with the liveryman, Rawlins going back to the sheeplot again. He was not sorry for Edith, try as he might to get up a little sympathy for her. Ordering by mail was such an established business in the sheep country, he supposed, that a girl naturally thought of getting her romance that way. She had drawn a high prize from the catalogue; that was a cinch. Peck was a rarity fit to put in a case and keep.

Rawlins went grinning about the things he found wanting done around the sheds and lots, wondering what the girl had written that had moved this sample of St. Joe's chivalry to pack his three bags and point his moustaches into the west. He wouldn't have come without encouragement; he hardly would have risked the jump, forward and indelicate as he plainly was, without a pretty strong hope. Peck was not a man to allow any grass to grow between his toes. He would push things along; right along. He was the kind that would take a crack over the nose like a hound, his head popped back in the pot before the yelp was out of his mouth. It was a situation of large possi-

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 bilities, mainly humorous, as it looked to Rawlins just then.

Vaguely wondering how the young woman was to rid herself of this long-shinned suitor, pretty certain in his own opinion that a little thing like telling him he was not wanted would make very slight difference to Mr. Peck, Rawlins pottered around the place, tidying up the generally neglected aspect of the premises. He was too deeply concerned with his own future, the plans for which must be laid and developed anew, to allow Peck's advent to remain long a matter for speculation.

The sun was low on the hill when Rawlins concluded he had done about all there was lying around loose. He was turning to the house to change his clothes and get ready for supper, when Edith came bursting across the lot, throwing a wild look back over her shoulder as she approached, considerably agitated, panting as if she had just wrenched herself from Peck's ardent but unwelcome arms.

"There's some motherless lambs—five of them—that the ewes wouldn't take," she panted, "back in the far shed. I'm afraid they'll starve."

"They're all right," he assured her cheerfully. "I found them. I divided them up among three ewes—they'll be all right now."

"You did?" she questioned, incredulous and grateful in a breath. "I couldn't do a thing with the selfish old things, I tried all morning before I went to town. How did you do it?"

"Oh, just blarneyed 'em along a little," he replied, discounting his success.

"Well, I couldn't do it, and me a sheepman," she

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 declared. "Aunt Lila must be right, you're a born sheepman."

"Thanks. What's on your mind, Miss Stone?"

He knew well enough it was not the lambs. No sheepman would be that much concerned over a few motherless lambs.

"That pop-eyed Peck wanted to kiss me—he tried to kiss me!"

She was hot enough to fry pancakes, her face as red as if Peck's horny stubble of beard had come too close for comfort. She looked toward the house, fearful that the mail-order suitor might be following her in pursuit of his amorous design, drawing the back of her hand spitefully across her cheek as if brushing away a pestiferous insect.

"Yes, and he did," Rawlins said, laughing unsympathetically.

"He did not!" she denied with high indignation. "He kissed Aunt Lila—he's made a big hit with her already. Darned fool! he thinks I'm going to marry him! He told Aunt Lila I sent for him."

"Didn't you?"

"No, I didn't. I never as much as hinted I wanted him to come. Oh, Mr. Rawlins!" appealingly, her hands extended in earnest supplication—"can't you have a little sympathy for me? Don't you see I'm in a devil of a fix?"

"You certainly are—if you really don't want that chap around."

"He writes a whole lot better than he talks, or looks," she pleaded her excuse for the affair, "and the picture he sent me didn't show all of him."

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 "I'll bet you. It'd sure take a whopper to do that."

"He'll stay here always, he'll never go away!" she moaned.

"He does look like a pretty good stayer," Rawlins granted cheerfully.

"I want you to help me out!" impetuously, her hands held out in that ingenuous appeal.

"What do you want me to do? take him off and drop him in a hole somewhere?"

"Oh, can't you be serious?" a bit pettishly, very much ashamed of her fix.

"Seriously, then, I'll do what I can to relieve you of him, Miss Stone. You remember the story of the unwelcome suitors?"

"I wouldn't ask you to shoot him, though," she replied, answering him doubly, but too serious for even a smile.

"But I'm afraid that ancient gentleman's method with self-appointed beaux is about the only one that will ever break Mr. Peck loose."

"If he thought there was somebody else—if I gave him to understand there was somebody else," earnestly, her troubled eyes holding his own, her troubled voice like a reproving finger laid on the smile that twitched his lips—"if I could tell him I'm already engaged, and show him the ring."

"Fine! That's the ticket. Slip on a ring and tell him somebody beat him to it. That ought to put him right."

"Yes, and the first thing he'd want to know would be the man's name, simple!" she said. "There's got to be a man, and men aren't so plentiful up in this country

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 you can go out and tag one when you want him. Even that old lizard ain't green enough to believe I'd marry a sheep-herder. I've got to have a real man. Won't you help me out, Mr. Rawlins? Please, won't you—help me out?"

Rawlins was uncomfortable, hot in a flush, and red as a gobbler. But he tried to be calm, and accept the proposal in the spirit of frankness in which it was made.

"You mean you want me to be the man?"

"Yes, if you'll only do me the favor, please, Mr. Rawlins. Only temporarily, you know, not in earnest. It'll only be a bluff, it'll all be off as soon as he goes away and leaves me alone."

"I don't know whether I'm going to be around here longer than to-morrow," Rawlins objected.

"That don't make any difference."

"But if it got talked around that we're engaged, you know, it might be kind of awkward for us. We couldn't explain that it's only a bluff; that would defeat the purpose."

"Oh, he'll leave—he'll leave right away when I tell him I'm engaged to you."

She was confident, and beaming in her confidence so brightly, Rawlins thought it wouldn't be any great hardship to be engaged to her, even though there was no bluff about it.

"It's a little bit cheap, though," he said, "and I wouldn't want you to do anything cheap. There's a better way—there must be a better way—not that I wouldn't feel the honor of being only temporarily engaged to you, Miss Stone. I'll do all I can to help you

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 in any other way, but I don't believe it's necessary for you to—to—frankly, cheapen yourself by announcing your engagement to a perfect stranger just to get rid of this nuisance from St. Joe."

"I've made a fool of myself—I'm always making a fool of myself!" she said, bitterly ashamed, hiding her burning face between her hands, turning away.

"No, you haven't, not in the least. You've just come to a stranger offering him a confidence he doesn't deserve. I couldn't let you do that, you know. The idea came to you in your desperation"

"When he tried to kiss me," she nodded, her face puckered to hold back the tears of vexation and shame. "He said engaged people always kissed when they met. I thought of you—I thought I could get you to help me."

"I will help you, too. You don't have to marry that man, you know. There's no way on earth he can make you do that."

"But he'll hang around!" she wailed. "No telling how long he'll hang around tryin' to make me change my mind."

"We'll see about that. Don't you worry over Mr. McDowell Peck."

"Dowell. There's no Mc to it. I used to think it was kind of cute—but look at him! just look at him!"

"I took a pretty good squint," Rawlins told her. "I think you can have a lot of fun out of Peck if you handle him right. Don't worry. If I stick around this neighborhood a little while, and I'm hoping, I'll see if we can't put something hot under Peck's feet that will start him back to St. Joe on the jump."

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 "If you only would!"

"Treat him like a Dutch uncle," Rawlins advised, "ride around with him, show him he can be a friend, and nothing but a friend. What's he doing now?"

"He was going to shave, he got out a mug as big as the well-bucket and stood in the kitchen door stirrin' up his mess of lather, talkin' all the time. It's something terrible the deception they can put in a photograph of a man."

"Yes, and even of the ladies now and then."

"He took off his collar to get at his whiskers. You've only seen about half of that man."

"Was it before, or after, that he tried his little loving pass with you?"

"Before, darn him! He slopped his old lather all over the kitchen floor—some of it got on my face. Aunt Lila nearly split herself laughin'. I never saw her take such an shine to a man—I don't see where her sudden interest in seein' me married comes in. She's my guardian, and will be till I'm my own man."

"That will be a good while yet," he said, not believing it, but following the age-old custom for men to pretend women are younger than they seem.

"No, only a few weeks more. I'll be twenty-one in June, but I don't expect to kick anything over when I am."

"Except Peck's fond hopes, maybe."

"I'd hang myself if I thought he was going to stick around here that long," she declared.

"If that's the way you take it, something's got to be done to start him on his way."

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 "I hope to God!" she said, with the reckless fervency of people who live aside from the restrictions of theological discipline. "I'll try to handle him the way you say, but if he ever tries to kiss me again I'll slap him to sleep!"

"No, that wouldn't be the way to handle him," Rawlins said. "He's used to ladies who express themselves that way. A man like Peck considers a blow from a lady's hand nothing less than a love tap. It only makes him keener. Be cold; be severely dignified. Back away, put up your hand, and tell him 'Sir!' That always gets a man like Peck: 'Sir!' You could do it about right to freeze him to the floor."

"I'll try it on," she said, greatly encouraged, doubtless believing she was getting advice from a very worldly and sophisticated source.

"That'll be the game. He's been training with slapping ladies all his life, but put him in front of one of the dignified, icy kind and he'll be as helpless as the frog that swallowed the shot."

"Thank you for helping me out, Mr. Rawlins," she said, truly grateful, more for the confidence she had reposed in him, if she had stopped to think about it, than any assistance he had given.

"There's no thanks due on a promise—I haven't helped you yet," he reminded her.

"But you've promised, and that's the same as done."

"I do try to make it come out that way," he said, with somewhat bashful modesty.

"If you're going to learn the sheep business you might as well learn it on this ranch," she suggested

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 hopefully. "I'll speak to Aunt Lila about it, if you're not too proud to take a job from a woman."

"No, that might look like politics," he said. "Let her offer me a job if she wants a man. That would be better."

"Hiring and firing are pretty much in the hands of her foreman, Elmer Tippie," said Edith. "Maybe you'd better strike him for a job. You could do that all right."

"Sure I could, and I will. Where is he?"

"He's on the road home from Jasper; we expect him this evening. He took the last of our clip down last week; he's bringin' up supplies."

"I'll talk to him. There are reasons—several reasons—why I'd rather put in my sheep-raising apprenticeship on this ranch than any other in the world."

"Mr. Peck, for one," she suggested.

"He's only a comical incidental," he said, looking at her warmly, so warmly that her eyes retreated, and a little flush, that was not from the fire of displeasure, brightened in her cheek.

"You'd better come on in and get ready for supper," she said. "Aunt Lila will be yellin' for you in a minute."

He followed her through the corral gate, where she waited until he had fastened it, when they went on together, chatting as if years lay behind the time of their first meeting. Dowell Peck appeared on the kitchen porch, apparently as much at home as a stray dog that has found an open door. He waved at them, flapping his long arm like a railroad semaphore. Then he fell to preening his luxuriant moustache, giving it

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 an upward twirl with elegant crook of the elbow, well satisfied with the sheep country and all in it, but satisfied with himself above all the objects in art and nature that the whole world contained.

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made his appearance a little after sunset, his approach announced by the noise of the three wagons in his train long before they came in sight. There were four horses to a wagon, each of the vehicles being pretty well loaded with boxes, barrels and sacks. Rawlins beheld this wholesale provisioning with amazement. He thought that must be a heavy-feeding family if that represented only six months' supplies, as Mrs. Duke had told him her foreman was bringing along from Jasper.

On this point Rawlins received considerable enlightenment while he helped Elmer and the drivers put the teams away. That generous providing was mainly on account of twelve sheep-herders who were looking after a matter of thirty thousand sheep carrying the big black D on the adjoining range.

That was a business of considerably more importance than the modest homestead indicated. Ewes were selling in that day around five dollars a head on the range; wool at forty cents a pound. It required no very difficult computation to arrive at the conclusion that Mrs. Duke was one of the big ones in the sheep world of whom Clemmons had spoken.

One of the drivers said that was the third trip they had made to Jasper in the past month with the spring

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 clip from Mrs. Duke's flock. Not from the ranch; few sheep were sheared on the ranch. There were some big shearing-pens about half-way between there and Jasper, where flocks for miles around were assembled at shearing-time. Yes, they'd marketed a right smart of wool that spring, the driver said, which was as close to a specific statement as he appeared willing to go, in the manner of suspicious caution that seemed to afflict everybody who had anything to do with sheep.

Edith had not said anything to reveal the magnitude of their enterprise; Mrs. Duke had kept her voluble mouth shut on her numbers and extent. Rawlins had concluded them to be considerably more important than Clemmons, yet far below the greasy plutocrats from whom he had drawn his inspiration on the Kansas City market.

Rawlins wondered, in the light of this information gathered from the driver, what part Edith had in the concern, if any at all beyond her position in the household as ward of her aunt; whether she was native to that country, and if not, whence she had come, and when. It was not extraordinary that a young man should think more about a young woman at that juncture of events than of sheep, even thirty thousand sheep. The mind of youth commonly turns to such contemplation. It is a sort of entrancing obligato to the solo of a young man's life.

Rawlins made it a point to introduce himself to Elmer Tippie before going in to supper, explaining his presence at the ranch, and putting in his application for a job. Tippie looked him over slowly, being a deliberate and cautious man, and said he'd let him

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 know in the morning. This being as nearly a direct answer as could be expected of a sheepman, Rawlins was satisfied.

Tippie appeared to be an austere and unfriendly man. He was somewhere between fifty and sixty, a dark, sinewy man of medium stature, his corduroy pantaloons, laced into knee boots, bagging like a zouave's. It might have been that whiskers were bringing forty dollars, where wool brought forty cents, a pound, judging by the closely shaved appearance of Tippie's lean, brown, tough-skinned face.

He wore a black leather coat that appeared to be made of whaleskin, or the skin of some creature that lived in water, it was so oily and glistening. Tippie scarcely opened his thin lips when he spoke, his words coming out with a nosy, surly sound. He gave the impression of a man who had been cheated early in life, and never had ceased brooding over it.

The two drivers kindled a fire by the creek, dipping water from it for their coffee, neither invited to their employer's table nor expecting to be. Rawlins stood watching them while Tippie talked in the kitchen door with Mrs. Duke, wondering how he should take to that sort of life, and whether the social distinction that appeared to bar them from the ranch-house table would be enforced in his case when he put on a duck coat with sheepskin collar and became the warder of sheep on the dusty hills.

A long table stood in the big kitchen, room at it for a dozen men, one end, only, being prepared for use of the present company. Mrs. Duke sat at the top, Tippie at one hand, Dowell Peck across from him. Edith

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 was beside Peck, Rawlins opposite looking into her troubled eyes. Below them there was a barren of white cloth, as if the table had grown since the dishes were placed, stretching out in rebuke of the inhospitality shown the two men at the creekside, calling reproving attention to the fact of there being plenty room for all.

There was ham on a large platter; there was canned corn. There were potatoes, shipped from Colorado, and butter that was made in a Kansas City packing house from the fat of Texas beeves; it was currently known as bull butter in the sheep country, where it was generally favored above the natural product. Perhaps this was on the argument that any kind of butter that involved the life and carcass of the cow in making was the best kind of butter for people who were the uncompromising enemies of cows. There was milk in a tin from New Jersey, there were preserves of chemical composition, palely pink, gelatinously quaking, which came from Chicago. It was a largely artificial meal, but there was plenty of it.

Tippie had removed his leather coat and hung it on a hook that appeared to be reserved for him on the back of the kitchen door, disclosing a neat black jersey, and necktie of hue somewhat shocking in the light of his sour countenance and unfrivolous mien. Opposite him Peck sat with elbows spread wide on the cloth, amazingly arrayed in a Tuxedo coat with satin lapels, a low-cut, brocaded vest, a white shirt with bosom as big as the ham platter, and of similar form. All that could be seen of him above the table was correct to a

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 hair, even to the balance of a hair, which was parted to equilibristic exactness on the roof of his sharp head.

Mrs. Duke surveyed the mail-order beau with approbation and pride. She said that was the cutest little coat she ever saw; she never wished she was a man so much before in all her experience as at that minute, so she might wear one of its pattern. Mr. Peck must be careful of the ham gravy. It would be a shame to splash it on that fine garment, especially the satin lapels, where it would be harder to remove than freckles.

Peck smiled, serenely, supremely. Plebeians might splash gravy on their coats; trust a man of his finesse to come through with his Tuxedo as spotless as a cherry blossom on the topmost twig.

"Did you bring some magazines for the men, Elmer?" Mrs. Duke inquired.

"Um-m-m," said Tippie, making a grudging noise that might have been interpreted variously by one unaccustomed with his speech.

"I'm glad you did, I never had such a readin' bunch of sheep-herders as them boys. One of 'em's got a lot of law books out there in his wagon, studies 'em all the time. I think he's a little cracked."

Tippie was not interested in the literary hunger of the herders. He was mixing potato and corn, morosely absorbed in the enterprise, chopping and stirring with practiced hand. When he had it right, he added ham gravy.

Peck watched the preparation of this dish with patronizing amusement, which was spiced with a dash of disdain, as the set of his moustache expressed. He

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 turned to Mrs. Duke with a knowing smirk, as if he would slyly call her attention to the crude fellow's method contrasted to the feeding of a gentleman from St. Joe. Mrs. Duke's attention was fixed on her own plate, where she was mixing potato and corn.

Peck flushed a little, lifting his thin shoulders in expression of growing disdain, the left wing of his moustache twitching as he raised the corner of his lip to vent his contempt. He leaned toward Edith, nudged her with his bony elbow, all fixed to give her a knowing look that would contrast the crudities of certain of the company with his own refinements. Edith looked up with startled face, dropping her fork on her plate with a clatter. Peck's flush deepened; his look of high disdain was clouded over by one of sad disappointment. Edith had just begun to mix potato and corn.

Across the board in Rawlins' quarter there was neither sympathy nor support for Peck. Rawlins was reaching for the ham gravy that moment to pour it over his potato and corn.

Determined to show them this was not the method, even though he stood alone, Peck took one of the dishes reserved by Mrs. Duke for the pink preserves, filled it with stewed corn and began to eat it elegantly with a spoon. He dipped from him, leaning forward to meet the spoon with each replenishment, his implement held with thumb and three fingers, the fourth member extended in the crook of true refinement.

Even though Peck's performance might have been marred a little to the fastidious person by the gawping sound he made each time he leaned forward and opened wide his big red mouth, like a young robin

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 stretching its beak for a worm, it was carried off with an air of censuring triumph. Mrs. Duke suspended her own replenishment to watch him, following each dipping and lifting of the spoon with a movement of the eyes and head, very much as a dog watches the transference of every morsel his master raises from the dish.

Mrs. Duke was so engaged by this exposition of deportment as to forget her own standard mixture until Peck had dipped the last grain of corn from his dish. She drew a long breath, apparently as much relieved as if she had watched her guest through some danger into which his ignorance had enticed him. She did not comment on Peck's performance, although it was plain she had been impressed by it, probably not altogether in the way he had intended.

Peck dabbed his napkin to his moustache in a truly dainty and high-bred way, looking around the silent table with the triumphant, greedy expression of a cat that has just finished a bird. It was plain that some vindictiveness had attended this lesson in table manners, which Peck was not wholly able to conceal.

"I met that little wool buyer from Boston down at Jasper," Tippie said, speaking above his operations on a large piece of ham which he was cutting into bites before beginning to eat, pushing the severed pieces out of the way to the farther side of his plate.

"Mr. Murray?" inquired Mrs. Duke.

"No, not Murray. Feller that bought your wool three years ago."

"You don't mean Mr. Fairweather, Elmer?"

"Yes, Fairweather. Couldn't think of it. Nearest I could come was Blizzard."

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 This attempt at a joke, lame as it was, came so unexpectedly from the glum mouth of Tippie that it set Mrs. Duke back on her heels, figuratively, with laughter. Even Edith forgot the shadow of her mail-order beau for a moment to laugh, looking across at Rawlins for his support, which he gave heartily. Peck seemed rather bewildered than amused. He looked from one to another as if the point of the joke might be flying around the table and he expected to nab it by being alert.

"Oh, yes, I got you," he said. "Wool—blizzard—darn good joke!"

When Peck laughed, as he did immediately on his discovery of what he thought to be the humor of the thing, he elongated himself like a worm, making a croaking, dismal, distressing noise that was comparable to nothing but the working of a dry pump. Tippie, whose face had not shown a crease of mirth while the others laughed, looked up severely at Peck's outbreak, and solemnly offered him water.

"No, thanks," Peck declined, seeing no reason for such an act of courtesy at all.

Tippie put the pitcher down.

"Sounded like you needed primin'," he said.

"You was startin' to tell me about Fairweather," Mrs. Duke reminded her foreman.

"He was about to start off up here to see you, but I told him he might as well save his time. He wanted to contract for your clip next spring at forty cents, willin' to advance a dollar a head to bind you."

"I wouldn't 'a' took it, just as well he had sense enough to take your word. Wool's goin' to see sixty

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 cents before next shearin'; sheep's gittin' scarcer on the range every day, with all this fencin' and farmin'. I tell you, us sheepmen that's in the business now stands to cover up our past losses if we can stick."

"How many have you got, ma'am?" Peck inquired.

"Oh, I've got several, enough to keep me busy," Mrs. Duke replied. "Did you bring that change up from the bank, Elmer?"

"Um-m-m," said Elmer. "Out in the wagon. Forgot to bring it in."

Seeing that he was down to the last bite of ham, Elmer pushed back, refusing the dessert, saying he'd bring in that change. He returned soon with a bulky package done up in a newspaper, resumed his place at the table, removed the wrapper, displaying a bale of money big enough to choke a cow.

"Used the dern stuff for a piller comin' up," said Elmer. "I guess it's all there, I told 'em to put it up a thousand in a bunch."

Elmer passed the change, which he seemed to contemn with some sort of deep-seated grudge, along to his employer, who began nonchalantly to count the bunches which contained a thousand each, piling them carelessly on the side next to Peck. There were fourteen bundles of the banknotes. When she had verified the count by this rough operation, Mrs. Duke nodded, as if fourteen thousand dollars were but a small item in her daily doings, nothing but change, indeed. She handed a bundle to Tippie.

"I guess you'd better start around to-morrow and pay the boys," she said.

"Um-m-m," said Tippie. He put the money in the

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 pocket of his jersey, the end of it protruding like the come-on roll of a capper at a game.

Peck's exophthalmic eyes enlarged four diameters, apparently, at sight of the money. He turned pale with amazement, his moustache seemed to droop in the close proximity of wealth so carelessly handled.

"Gosh all fiddlers!" he said, leaning toward Mrs. Duke, touching the pile of greasy sheeplands currency with his finger as if to assure himself that it was real. "Ain't you scairt somebody'll come along and hold you up?"

Mrs. Duke looked at him sharply, rebuke in every feature, strangely altered from their good-natured cast to one of stony hardness.

"We don't have that kind of people in this country," she said.

"I wouldn't trust nobody no further than I could see 'em on a cloudy night," Peck declared, with such vehemence that his sincerity could not be questioned.

"You was brought up in a city," Mrs. Duke returned, softened by his honest concern for her money. "In this country we don't go around stickin' folks up with a gun—if we want to rob 'em we build a fence. Nobody'd touch money in this country if they found it layin' at the fork of the road—they'd think somebody'd left it there to pay off one of their hands. We do it, right along. If we can't find one of our sheep-herders when we want to pay him off, we just leave the money in a split stick till he comes along and finds it."

That was a standard sheepman joke for pulling on greenhorns; Rawlins had heard it many a time before. Sometimes a sheepman could get it off as if he believed

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