The stranger detached himself gently.

"I appreciate your hospitality," he replied courteously. "Who knows?" to Mrs. Toomey, "I might some day look in on you—I've never been out in that section of the country."

With another bow he paid his own account and left the restaurant.

"Thoroughbred!" declared Toomey enthusiastically. "Old Dear, I made a hit with him."

Mrs. Toomey was staring after the erect commanding figure.

She read again the name on the card she held in her fingers and murmured with an expression of speculative wonder:

"The spelling's different but—Prentiss! and she looks enough like him to be his daughter."



CHAPTER XVI

STRAWS

It was spring. The sagebrush had turned from gray to green and the delicate pink of the rock roses showed here and there on the hillsides. The crisp rattle of cottonwood leaves was heard when the wind stirred through the gulches, and along the water course the drooping plumes of the willows were pale green and tender. It was the season of hope, of energy revived and new ambitions—the months of rejuvenation, when the blood runs faster and the heart beats higher.

But, alas, the joyful finger of spring touched the citizens of Prouty lightly. Worn out and jaded with the strain of a hard winter and waiting for something to happen, they did not feel their pulses greatly accelerated by mere sunshine. It took more than a rock rose and a pussy willow to color the world for them. June might as well be January, if one is financially embarrassed.

The suspicion was becoming a private conviction that when Prouty acquired anything beyond a blacksmith shop and a general merchandise store it got more than it needed. Conceived and born in windy optimism, it had no stamina. The least observant could see that, like a fiddler crab's, the progress of the town was backward. But these truths were admitted only in moments of drunken candor or deepest depression, for to hint that Prouty had no future was as treasonable as criticising the government in a crisis. So the citizens went on boasting with dogged cheerfulness and tried to unload their holdings on any chance stranger.

A trickle of water came through the ditch that had been scratched in the earth from the mountains to some three miles beyond Prouty. Nearly every head-gate the length of it had been the scene of a bloody battle where the ranchers fought each other with irrigating shovels for their rights. And, after all, it was seldom worth the gore and effort, for the trickle generally stopped altogether in August when they needed it. If the flow did not stop at the intake it broke out somewhere below and flooded somebody. If the sides did not give way because of the moisture loosening the soil, the rats and prairie dogs conspired to ruin Prouty by tunneling into the banks. And if by a miracle "the bone and sinew" of the community raised one cutting of alfalfa, the proceeds went to the Security State Bank, or Abram Pantin, to keep up their 12 per cent. interest.

When the route to the Coast was shortened by one of the state's railroads and Prouty found itself on the cutoff, it was delirious with joy, but it regained its balance when the fast trains not only did not stop, but seemed to speed up instead of slackening; while the local which brought any prospective investor deposited him in a frame of mind which was such that it was seldom possible to remove his prejudice against the country.

These were the conditions one spring day when the buds that had not already burst were bursting and Mr. Teeters dashed into Prouty. "Dashed" is not too strong a word to describe his arrival, for the leaders of his four-horse team were running away and the wheelers were, at least, not lagging. It was obvious to those familiar with Mr. Teeters' habits that he was en route to the station to meet incoming passengers. This was proclaimed by his conveyance and regalia. He wore a well-filled cartridge belt and six-shooter, while a horse hair watch chain draped across a buckskin waistcoat, ornate with dyed porcupine quills, gave an additional Western flavor to his costume. His beaded gauntlets reached to his elbow, and upon occasions like the present he wore moccasins. There was a black silk handkerchief around the neck of his red flannel shirt, and if the rattlesnake skin that encircled his Stetson did not bring a scream from the lady dudes when they caught sight of it, Teeters would feel keenly disappointed.

"I can wrangle dudes to a fare-ye-well and do good at it," Teeters had declared to the Major. And it was no idle boast, apparently, for Teeters stood alone, supreme and unchallenged, the champion dude-wrangler of the country.

"It's a kind of talent—a gift, you might say—like breakin' horses or tamin' wild animals," he was wont to reply modestly when questioned by those who followed his example and failed lamentably. "You got to be kind and gentle with dudes, yet firm with them. Onct they git the upper hand of you they's no livin' with 'em."

Five years had brought their changes to Teeters as well as to Prouty.

He was still faithful to Miss Maggie Taylor, but a subtle difference had come into his attitude towards her mother. He was less ingratiating in his manner, less impressed by the importance of her father, the distinguished undertaker; less interested in her recitals of her musical triumphs when she had played the pipe organ in Philadelphia. Her habit of singing hymns and humming which had annoyed him even in the days when he was merely tolerated, actually angered him.

Now, as the four horses attached to the old-fashioned stagecoach which had been resurrected from a junk-heap behind a blacksmith shop, repaired and shipped to the Scissor Outfit as being the last word in the picturesque discomfort for which dudes hankered, the onlookers observed with keen interest as the Dude Wrangler tore past the Prouty House, "There must be a bunch of millionaires coming in on the local."

The horses kept on past the station, but by throwing his weight on one rein Teeters ran them over the flat in a circle until they were winded. Then he brought them dripping and exhausted to the platform, where he said civilly to a bystander, indicating a convenient pickhandle:

"If you'll jest knock the 'off' leader down if he bats an eyelash when the train pulls in, I'll be much obliged to you."

As is frequently the way with millionaires, few of those who emerged from the day coach sandwiched in between a coal and freight car, looked their millions. It was evident that they had reserved their better clothing for occasions other than traveling, since to the critical eyes of the spectators they looked as though they were dressed for one of the local functions known as a "Hard Times Party."

The present party of millionaire folk seemed to be led by a bewhiskered gentleman in plaid knickerbockers and puttees, who had travelled all the way from Canton, Ohio, in hobnailed shoes in order instantly to be ready for mountain climbing.

To a man they trained their cameras upon Teeters, who scowled, displayed his teeth slightly, and looked ferocious and desperate enough to scare a baby.

Then his expression changed to astonishment as his eyes fell upon a passenger that was one of three who, slow in collecting their luggage, were just descending. A second look convinced him, and he not only let out a bloodcurdling yell of welcome, but inadvertently slackened the lines that had been taut as fiddle strings over the backs of the horses. The leaders jumped over "the Innocent Bystander" before he had time to use his pickhandle, reared and fell on their backs, where they lay kicking the harness to pieces.

"You miser'ble horse-stealin', petty larceny, cache-robbin'—" just in time Teeters remembered that there were ladies present and curtailed his greeting to Hughie Disston. "Why didn't you let me know you was comin'?" he ended.

"Wanted to surprise you, Teeters," said Disston, dropping the bags he carried.

"Yo shore done it!" replied Teeters emphatically, casting an eye at the writhing mass of horses. "It'll take me an hour or more to patch that harness!"

"In that event," said the guest from Canton, Ohio, with a relief that was unmistakable, "it were better, perhaps, that we should go to the hotel and wait for you."

"It were," replied Teeters. "It's that big yella building with the red trimmin's." He pointed toward the town with his fringed and beaded gauntlet. "I'll be along directly, and if I kin, I'll stop and git you."

"Isn't he a character!" exclaimed a lady in an Alpine hat, delightedly.

Teeters wrapped the lines around the brake and descended leisurely.

"Set on their heads, Old Timers"—to the volunteers who were endeavoring to disentangle the struggling horses—and shook hands with Disston.

"This is Mrs. Rathburn and Miss Rathburn, Clarence—"

Mr. Teeters bowed profoundly, and as he removed his hat his bang fell in his eyes, so that he looked like a performing Shetland pony.

"Much obliged to meet you, ladies," deferentially. Then to Disston, darkly:

"I'll take that from you onct, or twict, maybe,—but if you call me Clarence three times I'll cut your heart out."

Disston grinned understandingly.

Toomey was among those who went to the Prouty House to look at the "bunch of millionaires" waiting on the veranda, and his surprise equalled Teeters' at seeing Disston.

"Say, Hughie—I got a deal on that's a pippin—a pippin. There isn't a flaw in it!" said Toomey confidentially.

"Glad to hear it, Jap," Disston replied cordially, and presented him to Mrs. Rathburn and her daughter.

The mother was a small woman of much distinction of appearance. A well-poised manner, together with snow-white hair worn in a smooth moderate roll away from her face, and very black eyes that had a rather hard brilliancy, made her a person to be noticed. Having engineered her own life successfully, her sole interest now lay in engineering that of her daughter.

The last place Mrs. Rathburn would have selected to spend a summer was an isolated ranch in the sagebrush, but propinquity, she knew, had done wonders in friendships that had seemed hopelessly platonic, so, when Hugh urged them to join him, and endeavored to impart some of his own enthusiasm for the country, she assented.

In another way the daughter was not less noticeable than the mother, though more typically southern, with her soft drawl and appealing manner. Her skin had been so carefully protected since infancy that it was of a dazzling whiteness that might never have known the sunshine. Her feet were conspicuously small, her hands white, perfectly kept and helpless. Nature had given her the bronze hair that dyers strive for, and her brown eyes corresponded. She was as unlike the other alert self-sufficient young persons of the "millionaire bunch"—who were either dressed for utilitarian purposes only, or in finery of a past mode as could well be imagined.

Miss Rathburn had managed to remain immaculate, while their faces were smudged and streaked with soot and car dust, their hats awry and hair dishevelled. Cool, serene, with a filmy veil thrown back from her hat brim, she rocked idly, utterly unconscious of the eyes of the populace.

"The scenery is grand—Wagnerian! Out here one forgets one's ego, doesn't one?" the lady in the Alpine hat was saying when, leading the party like a bewhiskered gander, the gentleman from Canton, Ohio, dashed to the end of the veranda with his camera ready for action.

"What a picturesque character!" she cried ecstatically, following. "And see how beau-tee-fully she manages those horses!"

The cameras clicked as a young woman sitting very erect on the high spring seat of a wagon and looking straight ahead of her came past the hotel at a brisk trot, holding the reins over four spirited horses.

Disston straightened and asked quickly:

"Who's that, Jap? It looks like—"

"Mormon Joe's Kate," Toomey finished. His tone had a sneer in it. "You were very good friends when you left, I remember."

The eyes of both Mrs. Rathburn and her daughter showed surprise when Disston colored.

"That we are not now is her fault entirely," he answered. "How is she?"

Toomey shrugged a shoulder.

"If you mean physically—I should say her health was perfect. No one ever sees her. She lives out in the hills alone with her sheep and a couple of herders."

"How very extraordinary!" Miss Rathburn observed languidly.

"Plucky, I call it," Disston answered.

"They've named her the 'Sheep Queen of Bitter Crick.'" Toomey laughed disagreeably.

"It's curious you've never mentioned her, Hughie, when you've told us about everyone else in the country."

"I didn't think you'd be interested, Beth," he answered stiffly.

Toomey changed the subject and the incident seemed forgotten, but Mrs. Rathburn's eyes rested upon Hugh frequently with a look that was inquiring and speculative.

* * * * *

Kate's heart always hardened and her backbone stiffened involuntarily the moment she had her first glimpse of Prouty. Invariably it had this effect upon her and to-day was no different from any other. Her eyes narrowed and her nerves tightened as though to meet the attack of an advancing enemy when at the edge of the bench, before she set the brake for the steep descent, she looked upon the town below her.

While her own feeling never altered and her attitude remained as implacable as the day she had sworn vengeance upon it, the bearing of the town had changed considerably. With cold inscrutable eyes she had watched open hostility and active enmity become indifference. Engrossed in its own troubles, Prouty had forgotten her, save when one of her rare visits reminded it of her existence. The comments upon such occasions were mostly of a humorous nature, pertaining to the "Sheep Queen," a title which had been bestowed upon her in derision.

They heard exaggerated accounts of her losses through storms and coyotes, knew that she acted as camptender and herder when necessary, continued to live in a sheep wagon, and they presumed that she was still deeply in debt to the mysterious person or persons from whom she had obtained money at the time the bank threatened foreclosure.

She was seldom mentioned except in connection with the murder of Mormon Joe, a story with which the inhabitants occasionally entertained strangers. In other words, she was of no consequence socially or financially.

Looking neither to the right nor to the left as she swung her leaders around the corner, yet no sign of the town's retrogression since her last visit escaped her—any more than did the mean small-town smirk upon the faces of a group of doorway loafers, who commented humorously upon the "Sheep Queen's" arrival.

Yet there were tiny straws which showed that the wind was quartering. A few persons inclined their heads slightly in greeting, while the deference due a customer who paid cash was creeping into the manner of Scales of the Emporium. And there were others.

These small things she noted with satisfaction. It was the kind of coin she demanded in payment for isolation and hardships. She did not want their friendship; she wanted merely their recognition. To force from those who had gone out of their way to insult and belittle her the tacit admission of her success was a portion of the task she had set herself. Her purpose, and the means of attaining it were as clear in her mind as a piece of war strategy.

Kate gauged her position with intuitive exactness, and could quite impersonally see herself as Prouty saw her. She had no hallucinations on that score and knew that she was a long way yet from the fulfillment of her ambition. When she had reached a point where to decry her success was to proclaim her disparager envious or absurd, she would be satisfied; until then, she considered herself no more successful than the failures about her who yet found room to laugh at her.

Kate now shrugged a shoulder imperceptibly as she noted that another store building was empty. So the tailor had flitted? She recalled the Western adage concerning towns with no Jews in them and smiled faintly. Two doors below, still another shop was vacant. "To Let" signs were not synonymous with prosperity. Hiram Butefish supported his back against the door jamb in an attitude which did not suggest any pressing business. Mrs. Sudds, who formerly had passed Kate with a face that was ostentatiously blank, now stared at her with a certain inquisitive amiability. Major Prouty sitting in front of the post office waved a hand at her that was comparatively friendly. Oh, yes—the wind was beginning to blow from a new direction, undoubtedly.

She stopped in front of the bank, where she kept an account only sufficiently large to pay her current expenses. She had set the brake and was wrapping the lines about them when a curious sound attracted her attention. Looking up she saw approaching the first automobile in Prouty, driven by Mrs. Abram Pantin. Beside her, elated and self-conscious, was Mrs. Jasper Toomey. Kate got down quickly to hold the heads of the leaders, who were snorting at the monster. The machine was of a type which gave the driver the appearance of taking a sitz bath in public. Mrs. Pantin when driving sat up so straight that she looked like a prairie dog. Mrs. Toomey unconsciously imitated her, so they looked like two prairie dogs out for an airing—a thought which occurred to Kate as she watched the approaching novelty.

The sheep woman had not met Mrs. Toomey since the day when the final blow had been given to her faith in human nature. Now while Kate's face was masklike she felt a keen curiosity as to how Time was using the woman who had had so much to do with the molding of her character and future.

She saw Mrs. Toomey's mental start when the latter recognized her, and the momentary hesitation before she drew back far enough not to be seen by Mrs. Pantin, and inclined her head slightly. It was the languid air of a great lady acknowledging the existence of the awed peasantry.

The incident filled Kate with a white fury that was like one of her old-time rages. Yet she was helpless to resent it. Her resentment would mean nothing to anybody, even if she had any way of showing it. It was quite useless at the moment for her to tell herself that Mrs. Toomey was only a pitiful inconsequential little coward, whose action was in keeping with her nature. She knew it to be true, yet she was stirred to her depths by the insult, and if anything more had been needed to keep her steadfast to her purpose, the incident would have accomplished it. Sensitive to the extent of morbidness—it was impossible for her to ignore the occurrence.

Kate's hands were trembling with the violence of her emotions as she tied a slip noose in a leather strap and secured the horses to the railing. She made a pretence of examining the harness in order to regain sufficient self-possession to transact her business in the bank with the impersonal coolness to which she had schooled herself when it was necessary to enter that institution.

Mr. Vernon Wentz at his near-mahogany desk was deep in thought when Kate passed him. He bowed absently and she responded in the same manner. It occurred to Mr. Wentz that a time when everyone else was either borrowing, or endeavoring to, she was one of the few customers whose balances appeared ample for their expenses.

The banker's attitude since his interview with Kate and her subsequent astonishing and unexpected payment of the mortgage had been one of polite aloofness. That matter was still a mystery which he hoped to solve sometime. But long ago Mr. Wentz had learned that the life of a banker is not the free independent life of a laundryman, and that with a competitor like Abram Pantin forever harassing him by getting the cream of the loans, it was sometimes necessary to make concessions and conciliations.

As Kate was leaving, he arose and extended a hand over the railing.

"We don't see you often, Miss Prentice."

She showed no surprise at his action and extended her own hand without either alacrity or hesitancy as she replied briefly:

"I seldom come to Prouty."

"I merely wished to say that if at any time we can accommodate you, do not hesitate to ask us." Mr. Wentz realized that he was laying himself open to an embarrassing reminder, and expected it, but Kate did not betray by so much as the flicker of an eyelid that she remembered when she had pleaded, not for money, but only for time to save herself from ruin.

"You are very kind." She bowed slightly.

"You are one of our most valued customers." Her reserve piqued him; it was a kind of challenge to his gallantry. "I hope—I trust you will allow us to show our appreciation in some way—if only a small favor."

"I don't need it."

"You are very fortunate to be in that position, the way times are at present. In that case," he smiled with the assurance of a man who had had his conquests, "I'll presume to ask one. We should be pleased—delighted to handle your entire account for you. You keep it—"

"In Omaha."

"Why not in Prouty?" ingratiatingly.

Kate did not answer immediately, but while she returned the gaze of his melting brown eyes steadily she received a swift impression that for some reason deposits would be particularly welcome. There had been no eagerness or anxiety to suggest it, yet she had the notion strongly that the bank needed the money. Perhaps, she reasoned swiftly, the suspicion was born merely of her now habitual distrust of motives; nevertheless, it was there, to become a fixed opinion.

While she seemed to deliberate, Mr. Wentz's thoughts were of a different nature. If she were not so tanned and wore the clothes of civilization—she had the features, and, by George! she had a figure! These interesting mental comments were interrupted by a sudden dilation of Kate's pupils as though from some sudden mental excitement. The gray iris grew luminous, he noticed, while her face was flooded with color, as though she had been startled.

"I will consider it."

The answer was noncommittal, but the graceful sweeping gesture with which he stroked his mustache as she departed was one of satisfaction. Mr. Wentz had a notion that after looking at him for all these years the young woman had just really seen him.

The banker returned to his desk, opened a drawer and extracted a small mirror, in which he regarded himself surreptitiously. What was it about him—what one thing in particular, he wondered, that was so compelling that even a woman like this Kate Prentice must relent at his first sign of interest? Was it his appearance or his personality?

In the pleasing occupation of contemplating his own features and trying to answer these absorbing questions, Mr. Wentz forgot temporarily that Neifkins, in violation of the law governing such matters, was in debt to the bank beyond the amount of his holdings as director, and behind with his interest—a condition which had disturbed the president not a little because it was so fraught with unpleasant possibilities.



CHAPTER XVII

EXTREMES MEET

Kate raised herself on an elbow and looked out through the open window above her bunk where the first streak of dawn was showing. The soft air was redolent of things growing and the pungent odor of sagebrush. The bush birds were chirping furiously; all the soul-stirring magic of spring in the foothills was in its perfection; but it conveyed nothing to Kate save the fact that another day was beginning in which to get through the work she had outlined.

She was like that now—practical, driving, sparing neither herself nor others—apparently without sentiment or any outside interest. Her sheep and that which pertained to them seemed to fill her whole horizon.

The interior of the wagon alone was sufficient to disclose the change in Kate. As the growing light made the dim outlines clearer it brought out on the floor and side benches a promiscuous clutter that contained nothing suggesting a feminine occupant. There was no scrollwork in soap on the window now. On the contrary, the glass badly needed washing. No decorative advertisement, no bouquet above the mirror, or festal juniper thrust between the oak bows and the canvas. A pile of market reports and Sheep Growers' Journals replaced the fashion magazines, while the shelves that had contained romances and histories were filled with books on wool-growing.

The floor space and side benches were occupied by new horse shoes, a can of paint, sheep shears, a lard bucket filled with nails and staples, boxes of rifle ammunition, riding boots and arctics, a halter and a broken bridle.

It all said plainly that the wagon represented only a place for sleep and shelter, yet, since she had no other, it was home to the sheep woman.

Kate raised herself higher on her elbow and called sharply:

"Bowers?"

A sleepy response came from somewhere.

"It's daylight—hurry!"

Bowers's voice, plaintive but stronger, answered:

"I'd be ten pounds heavier if it wasn't for that word 'hurry.'"

Kate smiled faintly. Complaining and threatening to mutiny was to Bowers merely a form of recreation and Kate knew that nothing short of a charge of dynamite could blast Bowers loose from his beloved wagon. He spoke invariably of the ranch as "Our Outfit" and he could not have been more faithful if their interests had been identical, though he missed no occasion to declare that it robbed a man of his self-respect to work for a woman.

The chief complaint of Kate's herders was against her brusque imperious manner and her exactions, which took no account of their physical limitations. Fatigue, weather, long hours without food or sleep under trying conditions, were never excuses to satisfy her for the slightest neglect of duty, or any error of judgment which worked to her disadvantage. She seemed to regard them as human machines and they felt it. All save Bowers obeyed without liking her.

"Headquarters" were still on the original homestead, but they had grown since they had consisted of Kate's sheep wagon, Mormon Joe's tepee and a ten-by-twelve cook tent. Now it looked like a canvas village when first seen through the willows, for there was a dining tent connected with the cook tent by a fly, and near it a commissary tent where were heaped supplies, saddles, harness and all that it was needful to keep under shelter, while around the tents was a semicircle of sheep wagons. There was a substantial horse corral, and across the creek the sheep-pens had tripled in size, with a row of well-built shearing-pens beside them. Under a long shed with a corrugated-iron roofing there were sacks of wool piled to a height which gave Kate a feeling of deep satisfaction each time she passed them.

Everything showed thrift, economy, a practical intelligence and a Spartan disregard for personal comfort. The camp was as devoid of luxuries and superfluities as an Indian village. And on a hillside where the afternoon sun lay longest there was a sunken grave enclosed in wire. Here Mormon Joe was turning to dust, unavenged, forgotten nearly, by all save a handful.

Kate felt that she had every reason to be satisfied with her progress and to congratulate herself upon the judgment she had displayed in continuing to raise sheep for their fleece when the price of wool was nil, practically, and every discouraged grower in the state, including the astute Neifkins, was putting in "black-faces" that were better for mutton. Now a protective administration was advancing the price of wool, and when she sold she would have her reward for her courage. She had been the first to import a few of the coarser wool sheep from Canada and the experiment had proved that they were especially adapted to the rocky mountainous range of that section. The Rambouillets she purchased had kept fat where the merinos had lost weight on the same feed. The ewes had sheared on an average of close to twelve pounds and the bucks more than fifteen, a few as high as twenty-five. And now she wanted more of them.

Thus circumstances seemed to have diverted her tastes into new channels entirely. As she had once yearned for clothes, and companionship, and happiness, she now with the same intensity wanted sheep, and more sheep, and better sheep. Little by little, too, and unobtrusively, she was acquiring script land, lieu land, long-time leases, patented homesteads, and the water holes which controlled ranges. To do all this meant the elimination of every unnecessary expenditure and she denied herself cheerfully, wearing clothes that were no better than her herders', shabby sometimes to grotesqueness.

The coming autumn she would have old ewes and wether lambs to ship sufficient to cover her expenses, while the sale of her wool at present prices would enable her to grade up her herds to a point that would be approximately where she would have them. She had seen too many hard winters and short ranges ever again to be over-sanguine, but she knew that unless some unprecedented loss came to her she was well on the way to the fulfillment of her ambition. A few good years and the "Sheep Queen of Bitter Creek" would no longer be a title of derision. But these thoughts were her secrets and she had no confidants. Bowers was the nearest approach to one, but even he knew nothing of the incentive which made her seemingly tireless herself and possessed of a driving energy that made all who worked for her fully earn their wages.

Bowers was preparing breakfast by lamplight when Kate clanged the triangle of iron to awaken two herders asleep in their "tarps" under the willows. They crawled out in the clothes in which they had slept, dishevelled and grumbling.

They breakfasted by lamplight, seated on benches on either side of the long table improvised from boards and cross-pieces of two-by-fours. There was no tablecloth and the dishes were of agate-ware as formerly. Kate ate hurriedly and in silence, but the usual airy persiflage went on between Bowers and the herders.

"It near froze ice this mornin'," Bowers observed by way of making conversation. "I was so cold that I had to shiver myself into a pressperation before I could get breakfast."

"I slept chilly all night," said Bunch, and added, looking askance at his erstwhile bed-fellow, "They ain't no more heat in Oleson than a rattler."

"Looks like you'd steal yurself a blanket somewhur," Bowers commented.

"I wouldn't a slept the fore part of last night anyhow," Bunch said pointedly.

"I hope I didn't keep you awake with my singin'?" Bowers's voice expressed a world of solicitude.

"Was that you makin' that comical noise?" Bunch elevated his brows in astonishment. "I thought one of the horses was down, and chokin'."

Bowers slammed a pyramid of pancakes upon the table.

"Why don't you take a shovel, Bunch?" he demanded. "You're losin' time eatin' with your knife and fingers."

"These sweat-pads of yourn would be pretty fair if 'twant fur the lumps of sody a feller's allus bitin' into," the herder commented.

"Maybe you'd ruther do the cookin' so you kin git 'em to suit you," Bowers retorted, nettled.

"Oh, I ain't kickin'—I lived with Injuns a year and I kin eat anything."

"You got manners like a pet 'coon," Bowers eyed the herder with disfavor as that person shoved a cake into his mouth with one hand and reached for the molasses jug with the other.

Kate paid no attention to this amiable exchange of personalities, for while she ate with the men she seldom took part in the conversation. Now she said, rising:

"Stack the dishes, Bowers, and come over and help us."

"Yes, Bowers," Bunch mocked when Kate was well out of hearing, "come over and run down fifty or sixty sheep and wrastle a few three-hundred poun' bucks and drag around several wool sacks and halter-break that two-year-ol' colt while you're restin'."

Bowers resented instantly any criticism of Kate by her herders. But he himself saw and regretted the change in her. Occasionally he wished that he dared remind her of the old adage that "Molasses catches more flies than vinegar," for there were times when she made difficulties for herself by her brusqueness, antagonizing where it would have been as easy to engender a feeling of friendliness. She was more interesting, perhaps, but less lovable, and this Bowers felt vaguely.

The work that morning went slowly. Bunch and Oleson moved with exasperating deliberation and made stupid blunders. The brunt of the labor fell upon Bowers and Kate, who soon were grimy with dust and perspiration. As the sun rose higher, so did Kate's temper, and her voice grew sharper and more imperious each time she spoke to the shirkers. The fact that the present task was necessary, because of carelessness on their part, did not tend to increase her tolerance. Bunch, herding a band of yearlings, had allowed them to get back to their mothers. To allow a "mix" was one of the supreme offenses and the herders knew that only necessity ever made Kate overlook it. If new men had been available, both Bunch and Oleson would have received their time checks quickly.

Kate had been at the "dodge gate" until she was dizzy. Her eyes ached with the strain of watching the chute and her arm ached with the strain of slamming the gate to-and-fro, which cut them into their proper divisions. The last sheep was through finally, but not until the sun was high and the heat made exertion an effort.

"There are some yearlings in there that belong in the 'bum bunch,' and six or eight with wrong earmarks. We'll have to catch them." Kate set the example by walking in among them, and immediately a cloud of dust arose as the frightened sheep ran bleating in a circle. Above the din Kate's voice rose sharp and imperative as her trained eye singled out the sheep she wanted.

"There, Oleson, that one! Bowers, catch that lame one! Hold that sheep with the sore mouth, Bunch, till I look at it."

The sheep dodged and piled up in one end of the corral to the point of suffocation, then around and around in a dizzy circle, with Kate and the herders each intent on the particular sheep he was bent on catching.

In the midst of it a laugh, feminine, musical, amused, rang out above the turmoil. Kate looked up quickly. Her swift glance showed her the figure of a man and a girl leaning over the gate at the far end of that division.

She frowned slightly.

"Bunch," curtly, "tell those people to stand back."

Bunch waved his hand and yelled bluntly:

"Git back furderer!"

Again the light feminine laugh reached Kate and her lips tightened as she thought cynically:

"Dudes from the Scissor Ranch over to look at the freak woman sheepherder."

Disston winced a little. Kate might misunderstand and take offense at Beth Rathburn's laughter.

But Kate ignored, then forgot them, until Bowers, working at that end of the corral, came back and jerked his thumb over his shoulder:

"That feller wants to speak to you."

Kate looked up impatiently, hesitated, wiped her face on the sleeve of her forearm and walked over without great alacrity.

As she went forward Kate looked only at the girl, who, cool and dainty in her sheer white muslin, her fair face reflecting the glow from the pink silk lining of her parasol, small of stature and as exquisitely feminine as a Dresden china shepherdess, was her direct antithesis.

Kate's divided skirt was bedraggled, a rent showed in the sleeve of her blouse, her riding boots were shabby, and the fingers were out of her worn gauntlets. Her hat was white with the dust of the corral, her hair dishevelled and her face, still damp with perspiration, was grimy. But somehow she managed to be picturesque and striking. Her clothes could not hide the long beautiful curves of her tall figure and she carried herself very erect, with something dignified and authoritative in her manner, while her wide free gestures were the movements of independence and self-reliance.

Disston looking at her eagerly and intently as she came closer noted that the changes the years had made were chiefly in her expression. The friendly candor of her eyes was replaced by a look that was coldly speculative, and her lips that had smiled so readily now expressed determination. Her whole bearing was indicative of concentration, singleness of purpose and patience or, more strictly, a dogged endurance. These things Disston saw in his swift scrutiny before she recognized him.

She stopped abruptly, her eyes widened and her lips parted in astonishment.

"Hughie!" She went forward swiftly, her eyes shining with the glad welcome he remembered and all her old-time impetuosity of manner. Then she checked herself as suddenly. She did not withdraw the hand she had extended, but the smile froze on her lips and all the warmth went out of her greeting. She added formally, "I wasn't expecting to see any one I knew—you surprised me."

Wondering at her change of manner, he laughed as he shook hands with her.

"I hoped to—it's one of the things I've been looking forward to."

Beth Rathburn was looking, not at Kate, but at Disston, when he introduced them; she could not remember when she had seen him so animated, so genuinely glad.

"I've been enormously interested—however do you do it?" Miss Rathburn said in her cool drawl, while she studied Kate's face curiously.

"It's my business," Kate replied simply, regarding her with equal interest.

"And you live out here by yourself, without any other woman? Aren't you lonely?"

"I'm too busy."

"You work with the men—just like one of them?"

"Just like a man," Kate repeated evenly.

"It is quite—quite wonderful!" Beth subtly conveyed the impression that on the contrary she thought it was dreadful.

Kate drew back her head a little and looked at her visitor.

"Is it?" coolly.

"And Hugh never has told me a word about you—he's been so reticent." She laid her finger tips upon his arm in proprietory fashion while a sly malice shone through the mischievousness of her smile.

Disston colored.

Kate replied ironically:

"Perhaps he is one of those who do not boast of their acquaintance with sheepherders."

"Kate!" he protested vigorously.

She regarded him with a faint inscrutable smile until Bowers interrupted:

"How many bells shall I put on them yearlin's?"

"One in fifty; and cut those five wethers out of the ewe herd. Catch those yearling ewes with the wether earmark and change to the shoe-string."

"What do you want done with that feller in the pen?"

"Saw his horn off and I'll throw him into the buck herd later."

"Where'll Oleson hold his sheep?"

"Well up the creek; and if he lets them mix again—"

"He says he can't do nothin' without a dog," Bowers ventured.

"Then he'd better quit right now—you can tell him." Kate's voice was curt, incisive, her tone final. "He can't use a dog on these Rambouillets—they're high-strung, nervous, different from the merinos. Anyway, I won't have it." She swung about to indicate that the conversation was ended.

"That's all Greek to me. Do you understand it, Hugh?" Miss Rathburn's lofty drawl, her faintly patronizing manner, all indicated amusement.

"I don't know much about sheep," he admitted.

"Do you know—" to Kate, with all her social manner—"you are deliciously unique?"

Kate, who detected the sneer, but had no social manner to meet it, asked brusquely:

"In what way?"

"You're so—" she hesitated for a word and seemed to search her vocabulary for the right one—"so strong-minded."

Kate's eyes were sparkling.

"If by that you mean intelligent, I thank you for the compliment, and I'm sorry that I can't—" She checked herself, but the inference was clear that she intended to add—"return it."

Miss Rathburn's fair skin became a deeper pink than even a pink-lined parasol warranted, while Kate addressed herself to Disston exclusively.

Disston had listened in dismay. Whatever was the matter? In truth, it must be, he told himself, that women were natural enemies. He never had seen this feline streak in Beth to recognize it, and he had felt instinctively that, on Kate's side, from the first glance she had not liked her visitor.

To Beth Rathburn, it was ridiculous that Disston should take seriously this girl who, at the moment, was considerably less presentable than any one of their own servants—that he should treat her with all the deference he showed to any woman of his acquaintance, as if she were of his own class exactly! And a worse offense was his obviously keen interest in her. It was a new sensation for the southern girl to be ignored, or at least omitted from the conversation, and each second her resentment grew, though the underlying cause was that she felt herself overshadowed by Kate's stronger personality.

To remind Disston of his remissness she walked over to a pen where Bowers, astride a powerful buck, saw in hand, was having his own troubles. She returned almost immediately, shuddering prettily:

"He's sawing that sheep's horn off! Doesn't it hurt it?"

"Not nearly so much as letting it grow to put its eye out."

"I presume you do that, too?" The girl's eyes and tone were mocking.

"Oh, yes, I do everything that's necessary." There was something savage in Kate's composure as she turned directly and looked at her. "I have sheared sheep when I had no money to pay herders, slept out in the hills on the ground on a saddle blanket with my saddle for a pillow. I've made my underwear out of flour sacks and my skirts of denim. I've lived on corn meal and salt pork and dried apples and rabbits for months at a time. I eat and hobnob with sheepherders from one year's end to the other. I'm out with a drop bunch in the lambing season, and I brand the bucks myself—on the nose—burn them with a hot iron. I'll send you word when I'm going to do it again and you can come over—it's e-normously amusing. Just wait a minute—come over to the fence here—and I'll show you something. I'm even more deliciously unique than you imagine."

She walked to the gate and vaulted it easily. Hughie and Beth could do no less than follow as far as the fence, while Kate stood searching the band of sheep that milled about her. When she found what she sought, she made one of her swift swoops, caught the sheep by the hind leg and threw it with a dextrous twist. Then holding it between her knees, she took a knife from her pocket and tested the edge of the blade with her thumb.

The girl at the fence cried aghast:

"Oh, what's she going to do?" Then she clutched Disston's arm and stared in fascinated horror while Kate ear-marked the sheep and released it.

"She's barbarous—horrible—impossible!"

"You brought it on yourself, Beth," he reminded her in a low tone. "You—goaded her,"

"And you defend her?" she demanded, furiously. "Take me away from here—I'm nauseated!"

"I'll say good-bye—you go on, and I'll join you."

He vaulted the fence and went up to Kate, who was going on with her work and ignoring them.

"Kate," he put out his hand, "I'm sorry."

She disregarded it and turned upon him, her eyes blazing:

"Don't you bring any more velvet-pawed kittens here to sharpen their claws in me!"

"Kate," earnestly, "I wouldn't have been the means of hurting you for anything I can think of."

"I'm not hurt," she retorted, "I'm mad."

"I'm coming to see you again—alone, next time. I want to know why you did not answer my letters—I want to know lots of things—why you're so different—what has changed you so much."

"And you imagine I'll tell you?" she asked dryly.

"You wouldn't?"

She shrugged a shoulder. "I don't babble any longer."

"It's nothing to you whether I come or not?"

"I'm very busy."

He looked at her for a moment in silence, then he held out his hand once more.

"I am disappointed in you!"

"Are you, Hughie?" she said indifferently, as she took his hand without warmth.

"Bowers!" Her tone was energetic and businesslike as she turned sharply. "Come here and help me earmark the rest of these yearlings."

Disston stood for a moment, feeling himself dismissed and already forgotten, yet conscious with a rush of emotion which startled him, that in spite of the fact that her dress, speech, manner, occupation, mode of life violated every ideal and tradition, she appealed to him powerfully, stirred him as had no other woman. She aroused within him an enveloping tenderness—a desire to protect her—though she seemed the last woman who needed or cared for either.

When Oleson with the ewes and lambs was well up the creek, Kate gave Bunch his parting instructions:

"Let them spread out more. You Montana herders feed too close—it's a fault with all of you. Can't you see the grass is different here? Use your head a little. Got plenty of cartridges? I saw cat tracks in a patch of sand along the creek yesterday. He got eight lambs in his last raid on Oleson's band. I'll have to put out some poison."

She walked slowly across the foot log after the last lamb had leaped bleating through the gate. She inspected her boots, noting that one heel had run over, and looked at her gauntlets, with the fingers protruding. Then, when she stepped inside the wagon, she walked straight to the mirror and stared at her reflection—dishevelled, her face frankly dirty, about her neck a handkerchief that was faded and unbecoming, a mouth that drooped a little with fatigue, her whole face wearing an expression of determination that she realized might very easily become hard. A few more years of work and exposure and she would be grim-featured and hopelessly weather-beaten. No wonder that girl had looked at her as though she were some curious alien creature with whom she had nothing at all in common! And Hughie had said he was disappointed in her.

This was Katie Prentice, she said to herself—Katie Prentice for whom the future, to which she had looked forward eagerly, had been another word for happiness—the Katie Prentice who had tripped in and out of that air castle of her building, looking like this girl that Hugh had brought with him. Now this image was the realization!

Just for the fraction of a second the corners of her mouth twitched, her chin quivered—then she raised it defiantly:

"To do what you set out to do—that's the great thing. Nothing else matters."

She slammed the door behind her and untied her horse from the wagon wheel.

"Come on, Cherokee, we'll go and see what that Nebraskan's doing."

The Nebraskan was standing on a hilltop when she first saw him, facing the east and as motionless as the monument of stones beside him. His sheep were nowhere visible.

As Kate rode closer the same glance that disclosed the band of sheep showed her a coyote creeping down the side of a draw in which they were feeding. She reached instantly for her carbine and drew it from its scabbard, but she was not quick enough to shoot it before it had jumped for the lamb it had been stalking. The coyote missed his prey, but the lamb, which had been feeding a little apart from the others, ran into the herd with a terrified bleat and the whole band fled on a common impulse.

The coyote followed the lamb it had singled out, through all its twistings and turnings, but maneuvering to work it to the outside where it could cut the lamb away from the rest and pull it down at its leisure.

Kate dared not shoot into the herd, and after a second's consideration as to whether or not to follow, she thrust the rifle back in its scabbard and turned her horse up the hill.

Even the sound of hoofs did not rouse the herder from his deep absorption. His hands were hanging at his sides, and his mouth was partially open. He was staring towards the east with unblinking eyes, and with as little evidence of life as though he had died standing.

"What are you looking at, Davis?"

He whirled about, startled.

"I was calc'latin' that Nebrasky must lay 'bout in that direction." He pointed to a pass in the mountains.

"A little homesick, aren't you?" Her voice was ominously quiet.

"Don't know whether I'm homesick or bilious; when I gits one I generally gits the other."

"You were wondering just then what your wife was doing that minute, weren't you?"

Her suavity deceived him and he grinned sheepishly.

"Somethin' like that, maybe."

"You are married, then?"

The herder began to see where he was drifting.

"Er—practically," he replied ambiguously.

"So you lied when you joined the Outfit and I asked you?"

The herder whined plaintively.

"I heerd you wouldn't hire no fambly man if you knew it."

"When I make a rule there's a reason for it. 'Family men' are unreliable—they'll quit in lambing time because the baby's teething; they'll leave at a moment's notice when a letter comes that their wife wants to see them; their mind isn't on their work and they're restless and discontented. I knew you were married the first time I found you with your sheep behind instead of ahead of you."

"You can't understand the feelin's of a fambly man away from home." He rolled his eyes sentimentally. The subject was one which was dear to the uxorious herder. He pulled out the tremolo stop in his voice and quavered: "You feel like you're goin' 'round with nothin' inside of you—a empty shell—or a puff-ball with the puff out of it. You got a feelin' all the time like somethin's pullin' you." He looked so hard towards Nebraska that he all but toppled. "Somethin' here," he laid a hand on his heart, approximately, "like a plaster drawin'. Love," eloquently, "changes your hull nature. It makes lambs out o' roughnecks and puts drunks on the wagon. It turns you kind and forgivin' and takes the fight out o' you. It makes you—"

"Maudlin! And weak! And inefficient!" Kate interrupted savagely. "It distracts your thoughts and dissipates your energy. It impairs your judgment, lessens your will power. It's for persons who have no ambition or who have achieved it. For the struggler there's nothing worth bothering with that doesn't take him forward."

"That's a pretty cold-blooded doctrind," declared the shocked herder. "If 'twant for love—"

"If 'twant for love," Kate mimicked harshly, "you wouldn't be indulging in a spell of homesickness and leaving your sheep to the coyotes! Sentiment is lovely in books, but it's expensive in business, so I'm going to fire you. Bowers will be here with the supply wagon to-morrow, so I'll take the sheep until he can relieve me. I'll pay you off and you can walk back to the ranch or," grimly, "take a short cut through the Pass up there—to 'Nebrasky.'"



CHAPTER XVIII

A WARNING

"I can't hold dem ewes and lambs on de bed-ground no more! Dey know it's time to be gettin' up to deir summer range; nobody has to tell a sheep when to move on."

The Swede swirled his little round hat on his equally round little head and winked rapidly as he gave vent to his indignant protest. Kate looked at him in silence for a moment and then said in sudden decision:

"You can start to-morrow, Oleson."

The early summer was fulfilling the promise of a hot rainless spring. Bitter Creek was drying up rapidly and the water holes, stagnant and strongly alkaline, had already poisoned a few sheep. The herders could not understand the sheep woman's delay in moving to the mountains.

"I'm runnin' myself ragged over these hills tryin' to hold back them yearlin's," Bunch declared. Bowers, too, having his own special brand of grief with the buck herd, had looked the interrogation he had not voiced. Kate herself knew that the sheep should have been higher up, away from the ticks and flies and on good food and water all of two weeks ago, but, on one pretext or another, had postponed giving the order to start, though she knew in her heart that the real reason was because Disston had said he was coming again.

Now she told herself contemptuously that she was no different from the homesick Nebraskan, and, having made up her mind, lost no time in giving each herder his instructions as to when and where to move his sheep.

Kate never paid wages for anything that she could do herself, so the morning after her decision to start for the mountains she was in the saddle and leading two work horses on the way to move Oleson's and Bowers's camps before the sun was up.

The two sheep wagons were a considerable distance apart and the road over the broken country to the spot where Kate wished Oleson to make his first camp was a rough one, therefore it was late in the afternoon when Kate reached Bowers's camp—too late to pull the wagon toward the mountains that night.

She pulled the harness from the tired horses, slipped on their nose bags with their allowance of oats, and, when they had finished, hobbled and turned them loose to graze in the wide gulch where the wagon stood. Then she warmed up a few pieces of fried mutton—and this, with a piece of baking-powder bread and a cup of water from the rivulet that trickled through the gulch, constituted her frugal supper.

While driving the sheep wagon it had required all her attention to throw the brake to keep the wagon off the horses' heels, and release it as quickly, to select the best of a precarious road and maintain the wagon's equilibrium, but immediately the strain was over and her mind free to ramble, her thoughts reverted at once to Disston, in spite of her efforts to direct them elsewhere.

Activity is the recognized panacea for a heavy heart, and efficacious while it lasts, but with a lull it makes itself felt like the return of pain through a dying opiate; and so it was with Kate as she lay wide-eyed on the bunk to-night with both the door and window open, while a warm wind, faintly scented with the wild peas that purpled the side of the gulch, blew across her face.

The rivulet gurgled under the overhanging willows and alder brush. A belated kildeer broke the night stillness with its cry. The hobbles clanked as the horses thumped their fore feet in working their way slowly to the top of the gulch. Bowers fired his evening salute before retiring as a hint to the coyotes, and, sometimes, when the wind veered, a far-off tinkle as a bell-sheep stirred on the bed-ground came to Kate's ears—all were familiar sounds, so familiar that she heard them only subconsciously. In the same way she saw the dark outlines of objects inside the sheep wagon—the turkey-wing duster thrust between an oak bow and the canvas, the outline of the coffee pot on the stove, the cherished frying pans dangling on their nails, her rifle standing on the bench within reach. So far as she knew, she and Bowers were the only human beings within miles, yet she felt no fear; to be alone in the sheep wagon in the dusk of the gulch held no new sensation for her.

She was thinking of Disston as the door of the wagon swung gently to and fro, rattling the frying pan which hung on a nail on the lower half of it, of her brusque and ungracious reply when he had told her he was coming again to see her, of the sorry figure she had cut beside the girl he had brought, and of her fierce resentment at the girl's covert ridicule. She had shocked and disgusted Disston beyond doubt by the manner in which she had retaliated, yet she knew that in similar circumstances she would do the same again, for her first impulse nowadays was to strike back harder than she was struck.

It seemed, she reflected, as though everything about her, her disposition, her history, her environment and work forbade any of the pleasant episodes, which the average woman accepted as a matter of course, ever happening in her life. To be an object of ridicule, the target of somebody's wit, appeared to be her lot. At odds with humanity, engaged almost constantly in combating the handicaps imposed by Nature, the serenity of the normal woman's life was not for her.

Anyway, one thing was certain; her poor little romance, builded upon so slight a foundation as an impulsive boy's ephemeral interest, was over. He would not come again—and she cared. She put her hand to her throat. It ached with the lump in it—yes, she cared.

The tears slipped down and wet the flour-sack pillow case. The outlines of the coffee pot on the stove and the frying pan dangling on the door grew blurred. Her eyes were still swimming when she suddenly held her breath.

An unfamiliar sound had caught her ear, a sound like a stealthy footstep. In the instant that she waited to be sure, a hand and forearm reached inside the door and laid something on the floor.

"Who's there?"

There was no response to the imperative interrogation.

With the same movement that she swung her feet over the edge of the bunk she reached for her rifle and ran to the door. There was not a sound or sign that was unusual save that the horses had stopped eating and with ears thrown forward were looking down the gulch. She picked up the paper that lay on the floor, struck a match and read a scrawl by its flare:

WARNING

Stop where you are if you ain't looking for trouble. Them range maggots of yourn ain't wanted on the mountain this summer.

What did it mean? The match burned to her fingers while she conjectured. Who was objecting? Neifkins? Since there was ample range for both, and each had kept to the boundaries which he tacitly recognized, there had been no dispute. A horse outfit grazing a small herd of horses during the summer months, and a dry-farmer with a couple of milch cows, who, while he plowed and planted and prayed for rain, was incidentally demonstrating the exact length of time that a human being could live on jack-rabbit and navy beans, were the only other users of the mountain range. Was it the hoax of some local humorist? Or an attempt to intimidate and worry her by someone whose enmity she had incurred?

Whatever the motive, was it possible that any one knew her so little as to believe they could frighten her in any such manner? Her lip curled as she asked herself the question. She had imagined that she had at least proved her courage.

Bowers, she knew, would stand by her; the others, perhaps, would use the familiar argument that it cost too much for repairs to be shot up for forty-five dollars a month.

Finally, she tossed the note on the sideboard and stepped out on the wagon tongue. The stars glimmered overhead and the shadows lay black and mysterious in the gulch, but she felt no fear as she stood there straight and soldierlike, her eyes sparkling defiance. She had, rather, a feeling of gratitude for the diversion—a hope that the threatened "trouble" might act as a kind of counter-irritant to the dull ache of her heavy heart.



CHAPTER XIX

AN OLD, OLD FRIEND

Bowers lay slumbering tranquilly in the shade of the wagon, his saddle blanket beneath him and his folded arms for a pillow as he slept on his face. The herd chewed its cud drowsily under the quaking asp nearby, out of the mid-day heat and away from pestiferous flies, while under a bush not far from the wagon a lamb lay with eyes half closed, waggling its narrow jaw, and grinding its sharp white teeth noisily.

Quite as though some thought had come to it forcibly, the lamb got up and stood regarding Bowers reflectively with its soft black eyes. Then it swallowed its cud with a gulp and, making a run the length of the herder's legs and spine, planted its forefeet in his neck, where it stopped.

"Mary! You quit that!" Bowers murmured crossly.

The lamb merely reached down and chewed energetically on Bowers's ear.

"Confound you—can't you let a feller sleep?" The hand that pushed the lamb away was gentle in spite of the exasperation of his tone.

The lamb backed away, eyed him attentively for several minutes as he lay prostrate, and then quite as though a tightly coiled spring had been released, leaped into the air and landed with all four feet bunched in the small of Bowers's back.

Bowers sat up and said complainingly as he grabbed the lamb by the wool and drew it towards him:

"There ain't a minute's peace when you're awake, Mary! If I done what I ort, I'd work you over. You're the worst nuisance of a bum lamb ever raised on canned milk."

The lamb, which Bowers had named regardless of its sex, stood motionless with bliss as he rubbed the base of what would some day probably be as fine a pair of horns as ever grew on a buck. At present they were soft and not more than an inch and a half in length as they sprouted through its dingy wool. Thin in the shoulders and rump, yet "Mary's" sides were distended until their contour resembled that of a toy balloon inflated to the bursting point.

Now as the lamb's long white lashes drooped until he seemed about to go to sleep and fall down under Bowers's soothing ministrations, the latter continued the one-sided conversation which was a part of their daily life together:

"You're a smart sheep, Mary—no gittin' away from it—but you're a torment, and you ain't no gratitude. Whur'd you been at if I hadn't heard you blattin' and went after you? A coyote would a ketched you before sundown. And ain't I been a mother to you, giving up all my air-tight milk to feed you? Warmin' it fer you and packin' you 'round like you was a million-dollar baby so the bobcats won't git you—kin you deny it? An' this is my thanks fer it—wake me up walkin' on me, to say nothin' of mornin's when you start jumpin' on my tepee, makin' a toboggan slide out'n it before any other sheep is stirrin'. Ain't you no conscience a-tall, Mary?"

"Ma-a-a-aa!"

The quavering plaintiff bleat evoked a look of admiration.

"Oh, you have—have you? I more'n half believe you know what I'm sayin'. You're some sheep, Mary, an' if you jest stick 'round with me till you're growed I'll make a man of you. How'd you like a cigarette?"

"Ma-a-aa-aa!"

Bowers chuckled.

"Wait till I have my smoke an' then you kin have yourn, young feller."

He rolled and smoked half a cigarette while the lamb stood looking up into his face wistfully.

"I'll jest knock the fire out fer you first, then you kin have your whack out of it."

He shook the tobacco from the paper into his hand and the lamb ate it to the last fleck with gusto.

Bowers cried gleefully:

"You're a reg'lar roughneck, Mary! Doggone you! As you might say—you ain't no lady!"

The herder laughed aloud at his witticism and might have rambled on for some time longer if the crashing of brush had not attracted his attention. A man on horseback was picking his way through the quaking asp and Bowers awaited his approach with keen interest.

"How are you?" the stranger nodded.

"Won't you git off?"

Bowers strained his eyes to read the brand on the shoulder of the horse the man turned loose, but it told him nothing. While the stranger squatted on his heel, Bowers rubbed Mary's horns during an interval of unembarrassed silence.

"Bum?" inquired the stranger, eying Mary with a look which could not be called admiring.

"Yep." The garrulous Bowers had become suddenly reticent. The notion was growing that he did not like his visitor. He asked finally:

"Et yet?"

"Not sence daylight. I seen your tepee up toward the top and thought maybe I could locate your wagon and git dinner."

"I'll feed anybody that's hungry," Bowers replied ambiguously.

The stranger asked innocently:

"Who does this Outfit belong to?"

"Miss Kate Prentice owns this brand."

"Oh—the 'Cheap Queen'!"

Bowers's head swung as though on a pivot.

"What did you say?"

"I've heerd that's what they call her."

Bowers's eyes narrowed as he answered:

"Not in my hearin'." Then he added: "Nobody can knock the outfit I'm workin' for and eat their grub while they're doin' it. Sabe?"

"Don't know as I blame you," the stranger conciliated.

"I'll go cook," said Bowers shortly, getting up.

The stranger urged politely:

"Don't do nothin' extry on my account."

"I ain't goin' to," Bowers responded. "If we had some ham we'd have some ham and eggs if we had eggs. Do you like turnips?"

"I kin eat 'em."

"My middle name is 'turnips,'" said Bowers. "I always cooks about a bushel!"

The look that his guest sent after him was not pleasant, if Bowers had chanced to see it, but since he did not, he was in a somewhat better humor by the time he hung out of the wagon and called with a degree of cordiality:

"Come and git it!"

The visitor arose with alacrity.

"Want a warsh?"

The stranger inspected a pair of hands that looked as if they had been greasing axles.

"No, I ain't very dirty."

"Grab a root and pull!" Bowers urged with all the hospitality he could inject into his voice, as the guest squeezed in between the table and the sideboard. "Jest bog down in that there honey, pardner—it's something special—cottonwood blossoms and alfalfy. And here's the turnips!"

* * * * *

Conversation was suspended until a pan of biscuits had vanished along with the fried mutton, when Bowers, feeling immeasurably better natured, inquired sociably as he passed the broom:

"Where have I saw you before, feller? Your countenance seems kind of familiar."

The stranger looked up quickly.

"I don't think it. I'm a long way off my own range."

He averted his eyes from Bowers's puzzled inquiring gaze and focused his attention upon the business of extracting a suitable straw from the politely tendered broom. When he had found one to his liking, he leaned back and operated with a large air of nonchalance.

"You're fixed pretty comfortable here," he commented, as his roving eye took in the interior of the wagon.

"'Tain't bad," Bowers agreed, prying into the broom for a straw that was clean, comparatively.

"Is them all kin o' yourn?" The stranger pointed to a wire rack suspended from a nail on the opposite side of the wagon in which was thrust some two dozen photographs, fly-specked and yellow, while the cut of the subjects' clothes bore additional evidence of their antiquity.

"Lord, no! I don't know none of 'em. There was a couple of travelin' photygraphers got snowed up here several year ago and I bought ten dollars' worth of old pictures off 'em for company. I got 'em all named, and it's real entertainin' settin' here evenin's makin' up yarns about 'em that's more'n half true, maybe—Mis' Taylor over to Happy Wigwam says I'm kind of a medium."

Glancing at his guest he observed that his eyes were fixed intently upon a photograph in the center and his expression was so peculiar that Bowers asked, curiously:

"Ary friend o' yours in my gallery?"

"Not to say friend, exactly," was the dry answer, "but what-fer-a-yarn have you made up about that feller?"

"Well, sir," Bowers said whimsically, "I'm sorry to tell you but that feller had a bad endin'. He had everything done fur him, too—good raisin' and an education, but it was all wasted. That horse there was, as you might say, his undoin'. It was just fast enough to be beat everywhur he run him. But he kept on backin' him till it broke him—no, sir, he hadn't a dollar! Lost everything his Old Man left him and then took to drinkin'. His wife quit him and his only child died callin' for its father. After that he drunk harder than ever, and finally died in the asylum thinkin' he was Marcus Daly." He demanded eagerly, "How clost have I come to it?"

"Knowin' what I know, it makes me creepy settin' here listenin'."

"Shoo! I ain't that good, am I?" Bowers looked his pleasure at the tribute.

"Good?" ironically. "You oughta sew spangles on your shirt and wear ear-rings and git you a fortune-tellin' wagon. You're right about everything except that that horse never was beat while he owned him and he win about twenty thousand dollars on him, and that the last time I saw that feller he could buy sixteen outfits like this one without crampin' him, and instead of goin' to the asylum they sent him to the state senate."

Bowers laughed loudly to cover his annoyance at having bitten.

"It's come about queer, though," he said, "your knowin' him."

The stranger seemed to check an impulse to say something further; instead, he volunteered to wipe the dishes.

"No, you go out and set in the shade—it's cooler."

The truth was, Bowers did not want the man in the wagon, for his first feeling of mistrust and antagonism had returned even stronger.

"That feller's liable to pick up somethin' and make off with it," he mused as the stranger obeyed without further urging. "I shore have saw them quare eyes of his somewhur. Maybe it'll come to me if I keep on thinkin'."

In the meanwhile the visitor dragged Bowers's saddle blanket into the shade of the wagon and stretched himself upon it. Pulling his hat over his eyes he soon was dozing.

Bowers, rattling the plates and pans inside the wagon, suddenly bethought himself of Mary. What was the lamb doing not to be about his feet begging for the condensed milk which he always prepared for it when his own meal was finished? He flirted the water from his hands and hung out of the doorway.

Mary, a few feet from the unconscious stranger, was regarding him with the gentle speculative look which Bowers knew to presage mischief. It was not difficult to interpret Mary's intentions, and Bowers was fully aware that it was his duty either to warn the sleeper or reprimand Mary. His eyes, however, had the fondness of a doting parent who takes a secret pride in his offspring's naughtiness as he watched Mary. He did not like the stranger, anyhow, and the incident of the photograph still rankled.

"The Smart Alec," he muttered, grinning, "it won't hurt him."

The lamb backed off a little, made a run, and with its four feet bunched, landed in the pit of the stranger's stomach.

With an explosive grunt, the stranger's knees and chin came together like the sudden closing of a large pocket knife.

In spite of himself, Bowers snickered, but his grin faded at the expression which came to the stranger's face when he realized the cause of his painful awakening. It was devilish, nothing less than appalling, in its ferocity. Bowers had seen rage before, but the peculiar fiendishness of the man's expression, not knowing himself observed, fascinated him.

The lamb had backed off for another run when the stranger jumped for it. Bowers called sharply:

"Don't tech that little sheep, pardner!"

The answer was snarled through white teeth:

"I'm goin' to kick its slats in! I'm goin' to break every bone in its body."

"I wouldn't advise nothin' like that. Come here, Mary!" Bowers endeavored to speak calmly, but he was seized with a tremulous excitement when he saw that the stranger intended to carry out his threat.

"I'll pay you fer it," he panted as he tried to catch the lamb, "but I'm aimin' to kill that knot-head!"

Bowers dried his hands on his overalls and stepped inside the wagon. He returned with his shotgun.

"And I aim to blow the top of your head off ef you try it," Bowers said, breathing heavily. "That little innercent sheep don't mean no harm to nobody. Sence we're speakin' plain, I don't like you nohow. I don't like the way you act; I don't like the way you talk; I don't like the way your face grows on you; I don't like nothin' about you, and ef I never see you agin it'll be soon enough. You'd better go while I'm ca'm, for when I gits mad I breaks in two in the middle and flies both ways!"

Panting from his chase, the stranger stopped and stood looking at Bowers in baffled fury. Then he turned sharply on his heel, caught his horse and swung into the saddle. He hesitated for the part of a second before spurring his horse a little closer.

"You kin take a message to your boss—you locoed sheepherder. Tell her it's from an old friend that knew her when she was kickin' in her cradle. Show her that photygraph of the feller with the runnin' horse and tell her I said it was the picture of her father, and that he's scoured the country for her, spendin' more money to locate her than she'll make if she wrangles woolies till she's a hundred. Tell her a telegram would bring him in twenty-four hours—on a special, probably. Give her that message, along with the love of an old, old friend what was well acquainted with her at the Sand Coulee!" He laughed mockingly, and with a malevolent look at Bowers, plunged into the quaking asp and vanished.

Bowers stared after him open-mouthed and round-eyed. He had placed his visitor. "The feller that smelled like a Injun tepee in the drug store the night Mormon Joe was murdered!"

The discovery that his visitor was the malodorous stranger of the drug store impressed Bowers far more than his mocking message to Kate concerning her father. That might or might not be true, but he was entirely sure about the other.

His first impulse was to deliver the message, but upon second thought he decided that nothing would be accomplished by it, and it might disturb her. He argued that with a range war pending she already had enough worries. If only he could get word to Teeters somehow—or Lingle, even—to keep a lookout for the fellow, but since he was many miles off the line of travel and he dared not leave his sheep, there was small chance of notifying either.

It was a good many days before the incident was out of Bowers's mind for any length of time. He kept his shotgun handy and was on the alert constantly, listening, searching the surrounding country for a moving object, and muttering frequently, "What was he doin' here, anyhow—moggin' round the mountains—comin' from nowhur, goin' nowhur!"

But a month passed and nothing happened, either in Bowers's camp or at the others. Since the warning had implied that any attempt to move further would be stopped immediately, and yet all the wagons were now well up the mountain, both Kate and Bowers concluded that the threatening scrawl was intended only to annoy her.

"Ma-aa-aa!" Mary bleated like a fretful teething child, and held up his head for Bowers to rub the feverish horns as his foster parent sat on a box beside the wagon one lazy afternoon.

"I declare, Mary, I'll be most as glad when them horns cut through as if they growed on me! I could raise a baby by hand 'thout any more trouble than it's took to bring you up." The lamb stood stock still as he yielded to his importunities, and Bowers continued whimsically: "I been a father and mother to you, Mary, an' you might a-been an orphing through your own orn'riness if I hadn't throwed down on that feller pretty pronto.

"No denyin' 'twould have made a preacher peevish to have you land in the pit of his stummick with them sharp hoofs of yourn. But you're only an innercent little sheep, and they wan't no sense in his tryin' to stomp on you.

"Well, I got to be stirrin' up them woolies. Sorry I got to tie you, but you're gittin' such a durned nuisance, with playin' half the night and slidin' down my tepee. I'll give you the big feed when I come down in the mornin', so say your prayers and go to bed like a good lamb orta."

Bowers tied Mary to the wagon wheel, and, with a final rub and pat and admonition, left the lamb, to start the herd feeding toward their bed-ground on the summit.

"Come out o' that, Mother Biddies! Better start now and go to fillin' up. I want them children of yourn to weigh sixty poun' each, come fall."

The sheep, which had been lying in the shade or standing in a circle with their heads together as a protection against the flies, obeyed slowly, and Bowers followed as they grazed their way toward his tepee gleaming white among the rocks on the top of the mountain.

Occasionally he stopped to pick up something and examine it—a curious pebble, a rock that might make his fortune, a bit of grey moss, which always made him wonder what there was about it, dry as punk, brittle and tasteless, to make sheep prefer it to far better feed, to his notion—salt sage, black sage, grease wood, or even cactus with the thorns pawed off. No accounting for sheep anyway—"the better you knew 'em the less you understood 'em."

"Git to the high hills, Sister!" He tossed a pebble at a lagging ewe. "Want to feed all day in the same spot? Climb, there, Granny! Better look out or you'll git throwed in with the gummers and shipped afore you know it!"

While the sheep fed slowly toward the summit, Bowers sauntered after—tall, lank, neutral-tinted, his thoughts going round and round in the groove peculiar to herders—the sheep before him and their individual characteristics, the condition of the range, the weather, religion, the wickedness of "High Society," the items on the next list he would send to the mail-order house in Chicago.

And so the afternoon passed as had hundreds like it in Bowers's life until he sat down finally on a rock to watch the rays of the setting sun paint the clouds in ever-changing colors and lose himself in reflections, studying the gorgeous sea surrounding him.

It would be a great place up there for a feller's soul to float—provided he had one—restin' a while in that yaller one, or the rose-colored one up yonder, or takin' a dip into that hazy purple and disappearin'. Personally, he told himself, he believed that when he was dead he was dead as a nit, and he'd never seen anything about dying folks to make him think otherwise.

That Scissor-bill from back East in Ioway that died of heart failure jest slipped and slid off his chair, slow and easy like a sack of bran—he didn't show in his eyes any visions of future glory when he stretched on the floor behind the stove in the bunkhouse and closed 'em for good. Sometimes they kicked and struggled like pizened sheep in their sufferin', and again they went off easy and comfortable, but without any glimpses of Paradise brightenin' their countenances, so far as he could notice.

If he had a soul, all right; if he didn't, all right; that's the way he figgered it.

The lead sheep started for the bed-ground.

"Kick up your dust piles good, Mother Biddies, and git comfortable. Hurry up and blow out your lights so I can git to my readin'."

The light had faded, and the dingy gray-white backs became indistinguishable from the rounded tops of the sagebrush, as night came upon the mountain. With much sniffling, bleating, asthmatic coughing and crackling of small split hoofs, each sheep settled itself in practically the same little hollow it had previously pawed out to fit itself. A soft rumble came from the band as they stirred in their little wallows.

Then Bowers fired a barrel of his shotgun into the air as a reminder to possible coyotes in the rim rocks that he was present, and lighted the lantern in his tepee.

"I'll have to warsh that chimbly in a couple o' years," he commented as he set the lantern down and reached for a worn and tattered mail-order catalogue in the corner.

Fumbling under his pillow, he produced the stub of a pencil and a tablet, after which, crosslegged on his blankets and soogan, he pored over the catalogue. Jewelry, clothing, cooking utensils and upholstered furniture were on the list which Bowers, with corrugated forehead and much chewing of the pencil, made out laboriously. When the amount reached three hundred and sixty-five dollars, he hesitated over a further expenditure of nine for a manicure set and a pair of pink satin sleeve holders. That was a good deal of money to spend in one evening.

"Thunder!" he finally said recklessly. "No use to deny myself! I ain't goin' to send it, anyway!"

Having written it all in proper form and affixed his signature, he folded the paper and slipped it under his bed along with some three dozen other such orders that never got any farther.

This was Bowers's evening diversion, one in which he experienced all the thrills of purchasing without the pain of paying. He entertained a peculiar feeling of friendship for the House whose catalogue had helped him through long winter evenings, when night came at four, and interminable spells of wet weather, so when he sent a bona fide order to Chicago he never failed to inquire as to the health of each member of the firm and inform them that his own was excellent at time of writing, adding such items concerning the condition of the range and stock as he thought would interest them.

Bowers now slipped the lantern inside a flour sack, went outside in his stocking feet, and wedged the lantern between two rocks. The light "puzzled" coyotes, according to his theory, and gave them something to think about besides getting into his sheep.

When he had folded his trousers under his head his preparations for the night were complete and, this accomplished, the almost immediate expulsion of his breath in little puffs was proof enough that he was sleeping the peaceful sleep of the carefree.

A brisk breeze came at intervals to sway the tepee and snap the loose flaps. Sometimes a lamb bleated in a sleepy tremolo; occasionally, instead of puffing, Bowers snorted; but mostly it was as still as an uninhabited world up there on the tip-top of the Rockies.

Suddenly Bowers half sprang from his blankets—wide-awake, alert, listening intently. He had a notion that a sound had awakened him, something foreign, unfamiliar. Holding his breath, he strained his ears for a repetition. Everything was still. He stepped outside lightly. The sheep lay on their bed-ground, quiet and contented. Had he been dreaming? It must be. Too much shortening in the dough-gods probably. He'd have to stir up a batch of light bread to-morrow. It was curious, though—that strong impression of having heard something. He returned to his blankets and was puffing again almost immediately.

It was not much after half-past three when the first ewe got up, bleated for her lamb, and moved off slowly. Others rose, stood a moment as though to get the sleep out of their eyes, and followed her example. Ewes bleated for their lambs, lambs for their mothers, until quavering calls in many keys made a din to awaken any sleeper, while the whole mass of dingy, rounded woolly backs started moving from the bed-ground.

"Workin' like angels," Bowers muttered as he came out of the tepee dressed in his erstwhile pillow, to see the sheep spreading out before him.

He extinguished the lantern, replaced it in the tepee, and tied the flap, while the faint, gray streak in the east grew brighter.

"Ouhee! You pinto gypsy! Whur you roamin' to now? Think I want to climb up there and pry you out o' the rocks? Come back here 'fore I git in your wig. Ouhee! Mother Biddies! I'll whittle on your hoofs, first thing you know. You won't enjoy traveling' so fast, if you're a little tender footed.

"That's better—now you're actin' like ladies!"

The air was redolent of sheep and sagebrush, and pink and amber streaks shot up to paint out the dimming stars. Bowers drew a deep breath of satisfaction. O man! but sheep-herding was a great life in summer—like drawing, wages through a vacation. If those "High Society" folks that the Denver Post told of, them worse than Sodomites, steeped in sin and extravagance, could know the joys of getting up at half-past three in the morning and going down at ten to eat off a fat mutton—

Bowers's rhapsody ended abruptly. He drew a hand across his eyes to clear his vision. Down below, where he was wont to look for the white top of the wagon, there was nothing but scattered wreckage! He heard the sound now that had awakened him—the detonation of a charge of dynamite! There was no need to go closer to learn the rest of the story.

Bowers's face twisted in a queer grimace. He cried brokenly in a grief that can be understood fully only by the lonely:

"Pore little Mary! Pore little feller! Pore little innercent sheep that never done no harm to nobody!"



CHAPTER XX

THE FORK OF THE ROAD

It would have looked, to any casual passerby, a pleasant family group that occupied the front porch at the Scissor Ranch house one breezy morning.

There was Mrs. Rathburn in a wide-brimmed hat, plying her embroidery needle and looking, from afar, the picture of contentment. Equally serene, to all outward appearances, was her daughter, with her head swathed in veiling against the complexion-destroying wind as she rocked to and fro while bringing her already perfect nails to the highest degree of polish with a chamois-skin buffer. Hugh Disston sat on the top step cleaning and oiling his shotgun with the loving care of the man who is fond of firearms.

But if the Casual Passerby had ridden closer he might have observed that Mrs. Rathburn was thrusting her needle back and forth through the taut linen inside the embroidery hoop with a vigor which amounted to viciousness; that Miss Rathburn drew the buffer so briskly across her nails that the encircling flesh was all but blistered with the friction; and that Disston as he oiled and rubbed let his gaze wander frequently to the distant mountains and rest there wistfully.

Furthermore, the Casual Passerby—a blood relative of the Innocent Bystander—would have been apt to notice that this act of Disston's seemed automatically to accelerate the movements of the embroidery needle and the chamois buffer, and speed up the rocking chairs.

Propinquity was not doing all that Mrs. Rathburn had anticipated. There were moments like the present when, with real pleasure, she could have run her needle to the hilt, as it were, in any convenient portion of Disston's anatomy. She seethed with resentment, and took it out upon the climate, the inhabitants, the customs of the country, and Teeters—who gave her the careful but unenthusiastic attention he would have given to a belligerent porcupine.

Pique and disappointment smouldered also in the bosom of her fair daughter, who, if she had been less fair, might have been called sullen, since these emotions evidenced themselves in a scornful silence, which was not alleviated by the fact that Disston did not appear to notice it.

While the ladies attributed their occasional temperamental outbursts to the altitude, which was "getting on their nerves," it was no secret between them that their irritability was due to exasperation with Disston. With scientific skill and thoroughness they dissected him privately until he was hash, working their scalpels far into the watches of the night with unflagging interest. His words, his actions, his thoughts, as indicated by his changing expressions, were analyzed, yet, to the present, Mrs. Rathburn, trained specialist that she was in this branch of psychology, was obliged to confess herself baffled to discover his real feelings and intentions toward her daughter.

From the first, Mrs. Rathburn had suspected the "sheep person," and had cultivated Mrs. Emmeline Taylor who called for the purpose of obtaining supplementary details to the brief history that she had been able to extract from Disston and Teeters. What Mrs. Rathburn learned from that source was, temporarily, eminently satisfactory and soothing. It was too much to believe that Disston could be seriously interested in a woman of Kate Prentice's reputation and antecedents. Her daughter's account of her visit was equally gratifying, for Hugh Disston certainly was too fastidious to be attracted by a woman so uncouth of appearance and manner as portrayed in the vivid description the lady had received of her from Beth.

Yet as she looked back it seemed to her that some subtle change had come over Hugh from the very first day in Prouty, when he had seen the Prentice person and colored. He had been eager to go and see her, and had not been too keen for Beth's company upon the occasion, she had imagined.

It was all a mystery, and, thoroughly discouraged, she was about convinced that they were wasting precious time and ruining their complexions.

Disston continued to polish vigorously, using the gun grease and cleaner until the barrels through which he squinted were spotless and shining. When it was to his satisfaction, Disston put the gun together and sat with it across his knees, staring absently at the spur of mountains which Beth Rathburn had come to feel she detested. She tingled with irritation. She wanted to say something mean, something to make him feel sorry and apologetic.

She did not quite dare to speak sneeringly of Kate with no apparent provocation, but a violent gust of wind that snatched off her veil and disarranged her carefully dressed hair furnished an excuse to rail against the country.

"Goodness!" she cried explosively, as she lifted the short ends of hair out of her eyes and replaced them. "Will this everlasting wind never stop blowing!"

The fact that Disston did not even hear added to her exasperation. The soft voice, which was one of her many charms, was distinctly shrill as she reiterated:

"I say, will this everlasting wind never stop blowing?"

"It is disagreeable," he murmured, without looking at her.

"Disagreeable? It's horrible! I detest the country and everybody in it!"

Mrs. Rathburn shook her head reprovingly, but at the same moment another violent gust swept around the corner and lifted not only that lady's broad-brimmed hat, but her expensive "transformation."

Mrs. Rathburn replaced it with guilty haste, and declared furiously:

"I must say I agree with my daughter—the country and its people are equally impossible."

"I'm sorry," Disston replied contritely. "I shouldn't have urged you to come, but I was hoping you would like it—its picturesqueness, the unconventionality, and the dozen-and-one other things which appeal to me so strongly. In my enthusiasm, perhaps I exaggerated."

"I can't see anything picturesque in discomfort," Miss Rathburn retorted. "There's nothing picturesque in trying to bathe in water that curdles when you put soap in it, and makes your hands like nutmeg graters; or in servants who call you by your first name; or in trying to ride scraggly horses that have no gaits and shake you to pieces; or anything even moderately interesting about a country where there are no trees to sit under and nothing to look at but sagebrush, and rocks, and prairie dogs, and mountains, and not a soul that one can know socially!"

"I had no notion you disliked it out here so much, Beth," he replied gravely.

But he was not sufficiently apologetic, not sufficiently humble. She went on in a tone in which spite was uppermost:

"And furthermore, if unconventionality could ever make me look and act like that 'Sheep Queen' over there," she nodded towards the mountain, "I hope to leave before it happens."

"Hush, Beth!" Her mother's expostulation was lost upon her for, looking at Disston, she was a little dismayed by the expression upon his face when he turned and, leaning his back against the porch post, faced her, saying with a sternness which was foreign to him:

"It's quite impossible for you to understand or appreciate a woman like Kate Prentice, and you will oblige me, Beth, by refraining from criticising her, at least in my presence."

Hugh would as well have slapped her. She scattered the manicure articles in her lap as she sprang up and stamped a tiny foot at him: