She sat in the Colton library waiting for Deane to come and take her to a lakeside clubhouse for the evening. Tiny leaves showed on the trees and the lawn was a smooth velvet green.

Slade's words of the long ago recurred to her.

"A soft front lawn to range in," she quoted aloud. The reason for her restlessness came with the words.

Deane planned with her of evenings but the planning was all of play. No word of work crept into it. If only he would accept her as wholly into that part of his life as he did into the rest. She suddenly felt that he was excluding her from something it was her right to share. Their planning together was not constructive but something which led nowhere, a restless, hectic rush for amusements which she enjoyed but which could not make up the whole of her life. Always she had said that men went to extremes and made of their wives either drudges or little tinsel queens. They never followed the middle course and made them full partners through thick and thin.

And suddenly she longed to sit for just one evening before the fire and plan real work with Cal Harris. He had been the one man she had known who had asked that she work with him, instead of insisting that she work for him,—or that he should work for her. She had drifted along, expecting that that same state of affairs would go on indefinitely, believing that he filled the void left by old Cal Warren. But now she knew he held that place he had created for himself. They had worked together and she had deserted the sinking ship to play the part of the tinsel queen.

The men would be just in from the horse round-up and breaking out the remuda, preparatory to starting after the calves. She pictured Waddles bawling the summons to feed from the cook-house door. She was conscious of a flare—half of resentment, half of apprehension—toward Harris for not having sent a word of affairs at the ranch.

"There's millions of miles of sage just outside," she quoted. "And millions of cows—and girls." Perhaps he had gone in search of them. Perhaps, after all, he had found that the road to the outside was not really closed as he had once told her it was.

Judge Colton entered the room and interrupted her reverie by handing her a paper. In the first black headline she saw Slade's name and Harris's; an announcement of the last chapter of the Three Bar war.

The first line of the article stated that Slade, the cattle king, had been released. There was insufficient proof to convict on any count. She felt a curious little shiver of fear for Harris with Slade once more at large. The article retold the old tale of the fight and portrayed Slade, on his release, viewing the range which he had once controlled and finding a squatter family on every available ranch site.

She had a flash of sympathy for Slade as she thought his sensations must have been similar to her own when she had looked upon the ruins of the Three Bar. But this was blotted out by the knowledge that he had only met the same treatment he had handed to so many others; that he had dropped into the trap he had built for her. She found no real sympathy for Slade,—only fear for Harris since Slade was freed. The old sense of responsibility for her brand had been worn too long to be shed at will. She knew that now.

"I suppose you'll be surprised to hear that I'm going back," she said.

Her father's old friend smiled across at her and puffed his pipe.

"Surprised!" he said. "Why, I've known all along you'd be going back before long. I could have told you that when you stepped off the train."

He left her alone with Deane when the younger man arrived. She plunged into her subject at once.

"I'm sorry," she said. "But I'm going home. I'm not cut out for this—not for long at one time. In ten days they'll be rounding up the calves and I'll have to be there. I want to smell the round-up fire and slip my twine on a Three Bar calf; to throw my leg across a horse and ride, and feel the wind tearing past. I'm longing to watch the boys topping off bad ones in the big corral and jerking Three Bar steers. It will always be like that with me. So this is good-by."

Four days later, in the early evening, the stage pulled into Coldriver with a single passenger. The boys were in from a hundred miles around for one last spree before round-up time. As the stage rolled down the single street the festivities were in full swing. From one lighted doorway came the blare of a mechanical piano accompanied by the scrape of feet; the sound of drunken voices raised in song issued from the next; the shrill laughter of a dance-hall girl, the purr of the ivory ball and the soft clatter of chips, the ponies drowsing at the hitch rails the full length of the street, the pealing yelp of some over-enthusiastic citizen whose night it was to howl; all these were evidences of the wide difference between her present surroundings and those of the last eight months. She gazed eagerly out of the stage window. It was good to get back.

Both the driver and the shotgun guard who rode beside him were new men on the job since she had left and neither of them knew the identity of their passenger. As the stage neared the rambling log hotel where she would put up for the night a compact group of riders swung down the street. Her heart seemed to stop as she recognized the big paint-horse at their head. She had not fully realized how much she longed to see Cal Harris. As they swept past she recognized man after man in the light that streamed from the doorways and dimly illuminated the wide street.

Instead of dismounting in a group they suddenly split up, as if at a given signal, scattering the length of the block and dismounting singly. There was something purposeful in this act and a vague apprehension superseded the rush of gladness she had experienced with the first unexpected view of the Three Bar crew. Men who stood on the board sidewalks turned hastily inside the open doors as they glimpsed the riders, spreading the news that the Three Bar had come to town. The driver pulled up in front of the one hotel.

"It'll come off right now," he said. "Slade's in town."

"Sure," the guard replied. "Why else would Harris ride in at night like this unless in answer to Slade's threat to shoot him down on sight? Get the girl inside."

The reason for the scattering was now clear to her. Slade, on his release, had announced that he would kill Harris on sight whenever he appeared in town. Slade had many friends. The Three Bar men were scattered the length of the street to enforce fair play.

The guard opened the door and motioned her out but she shook her head.

"I'm going to stay here," she asserted.

Her answer informed him of the fact that she was no casual visitor but one who knew the signs and would insist on seeing it through. He nodded and shut the door.

Harris had dismounted at the far end of the block and was strolling slowly down the board sidewalk on the opposite side. Groups of men packed the doorways, each one striving to appear unconcerned, as if his presence there was an accident instead of being occasioned by knowledge that something of interest would soon transpire. A man she knew for a Slade rider moved out to the edge of the sidewalk across the street from Harris. She saw the lumbering form of Waddles edging up beside him. Other Three Bar boys were watching every man who showed a disposition to detach himself from the groups in the doors. The blare of the piano and all sounds of revelry had hushed.

The girl felt the clutch of stark fear at her heart. She had come too late. Harris was to meet Slade. It seemed that she must die with him if he should pass out before she could speak to him again and tell him she was back. She had a wild desire to run to him,—at least to lean from the window and call out to him to mount Calico and ride away. But she knew he would not. She was frontier bred. Even the knowledge that she was in town might unsteady him now. She sat without a move and the driver and guard outside supposed her merely a curious on-looker interested in the scene.

"A hundred on Harris," the driver offered.

The guard grunted a refusal.

"I'd bet that way myself," he said.

From this she knew that the two men were hoping Harris would be the one to survive; but the fact that their proffered bets backed their sentiments was no proof that they felt the conviction of their desire. She knew the men of their breed. No matter how small the chance, their money would inevitably be laid on the side of their wishes, never against them, as if the wagering of a long shot was proof of their confidence and might in some way exercise a favorable influence on the outcome. No man had ever stood against Slade. She noted Harris's gun. He carried it with the same awkward sling as of old, on the left side in front with the butt to the right.

"Fifty on Slade," a voice offered from the doorway of the hotel. The guard started for the spot but the bet was snapped up by another. Wild fighting rage swept through her at the thought that to all these men it was but a sporting event.

Her eyes never once left Harris as he came down the street. When almost abreast of the stage Slade stepped from a doorway twenty feet in before him and stopped in his tracks. Harris turned on one heel and stood with his left side quartering toward Slade,—the old pose she remembered so well. There was a tense quiet the length of the street.

"Those you hire do poor work from behind," Harris said. "Maybe you sometimes take a chance yourself and work from in front." His thumb was hooked in the opening of his shirt just above the butt of his gun.

Slade held a cigarette in his right hand and raised it slowly to his lips. He removed it and flicked the ash from the end, then inspected the results and snapped it again,—and the downward move of his wrist was carried through in a smooth sweep for his gun. It flashed into his hand but his knees sagged under him as a forty-five slug struck him an inch above the buckle of his belt. Even as he toppled forward he fired, and Harris's gun barked again. Then the Three Bar men were vaulting to their saddles. Evans careened down the street, leading the paint-horse, and within thirty seconds after Slade's first move for his gun a dozen riders were turning the corner on the run. Before the spectators had time to realize that it was over, the Three Bar men were gone. Slade had many friends in town.

The girl had seen Harris's draw, merely a single pull from left to right and by his quartering pose the gun had been trained on Slade at the instant it cleared the holster; not one superfluous move, even to the straightening of his wrist. The driver's voice reached her.

"Fastest draw in the world for the few that can use it," he said.

The guard opened the door. The girl was sitting with her head bowed in her hands.

"Don't take it that way, Ma'am," he counseled. "He was a hard one—Slade."

But he had misread his signs. She felt no regret for Slade, only a wave of thankfulness, so powerful as almost to unnerve her, over Harris's escape, untouched. She accused herself of callousness but the spring of her sympathy, usually so ready, seemed dry as dust when she would have wasted a few drops on Slade.

The next day, in the late afternoon, Harris looked up and saw a chap-clad rider on the edge of the valley. She had ridden over unannounced on a horse she had borrowed from Brill. She answered the wave of his hat and urged the horse down the slope. He met her at the mouth of the lane and together they walked back to the new buildings of the ranch. The men breaking horses in the new corrals were the same old hands. The same old Waddles presided over the new cook shack. Her old things, rescued from the fire, were arranged in the living room of the new house. A row of new storerooms and the shop stood on the site of the old. And in the midst of all the improvements the old cabin first erected on the Three Bar stood protected by a picket fence on which a few vines were already beginning to climb.

"It didn't take long to throw them up, with all hands working, along in the winter when there wasn't much else to do," he said.

After the men had quit work to greet the returning Three Bar boss she went over every detail of the new house. The big living room and fireplace were modeled closely along the lines of her old quarters; heads and furs were on the walls, pelts and Indian rugs on the floors. Running water had been piped down from a sidehill spring. The new house was modernized. Then Harris saddled Calico and Papoose and they rode down to the fields.

As they turned into the lane they heard the twang of Waddles's guitar from the cook shack, the booming voice raised in song in mid-afternoon, a thing heretofore unheard of in the annals of Three Bar life.

"There'll be one real feast to-night," Harris prophesied. "Waddles will spread himself."

They rode past the meadow, covered with a knee-deep stand of alfalfa hay.

"It was only tramped down," he said. "She came up in fine shape this spring. We'll put up a thousand tons of hay."

He held straight on past the meadow, turned off below the lower fence and angled southwest across the range. The calves and yearlings along their route gave proof that the grading-up of the Three Bar herds was already having its effect. Ninety per cent. were straight red stock with only a few throwbacks to off-color strains. The two spoke but little and near sunset they rode out and dismounted on the ridge from which, almost a year before, they had viewed the first move of organized law in the Coldriver strip.

A white-topped wagon came toward them up the valley along the same route followed by the file of dusty riders on that other day. A woman held the reins over the team and a curly-haired youngster jostled about on the seat by her side. A man wrangled a nondescript drove of horses and cows in the rear.

"That's the way we both came into this country first, you and I," Harris said. "Just like that little shaver on the seat."

"Will they find a place to settle?" she asked, with a sudden hope that the newcomers would find a suitable site for a home.

"Maybe not close around here," he said. "Most of the good sites you can get water on are picked up. But they'll find a place either here or somewhere else a little further on."

He slipped an arm about her shoulders.

"It's been right lonesome planning without a little partner to talk it all over with at night," he said. "Have you come back for keeps to help me make the Three Bar the best outfit in three States? I can't hold down that job alone."

She nodded and leaned against him.

"That's what they wanted—old Bill and Cal," she said. "But it's nice that we want it too. I've come for keeps; and the road to the outside is closed."

They stood and watched the sun pitch over the far edge of the world; and down in the valley below them the hopeful squatters were looking for a place to camp.

THE END