hetorical extravagance. His voice was loud; his
fancy ran a splendid course.

"Gentlemen," said he, "you-all interest me with your talk about your
prize Northern stock; but I claim that the bigger the state the bigger
the cattle it raises. That's why old Texas beats the world."

"But it doesn't," some one contradicted.

"It don't, hey? My boy"--Blaze jabbed a rigid finger into the speaker's
ribs, as if he expected a ground-squirrel to scuttle forth--"we've got
steers in this valley that are damn near the size of the whole state of
Rhode Island. If they keep on growin' I doubt if you could fatten one
of 'em in Delaware without he'd bulge over into some neighboring
commonwealth. It's the God's truth! I was up at Las Palmas last month--"

"Las Palmas!" The name was enough to challenge the buyers' interest.

Blaze nodded. "You-all think you know the stock business. You're all
swollen up with cow-knowledge, now, ain't you?" He eyed them from
beneath his black eyebrows. "Well, some of our people thought they did,
too. They figured they'd inherited all there was to know about live
stock, and they grew plumb arrogant over their wisdom. But--pshaw! They
didn't know nothing. Miz Austin has bred in that Brayma strain and made
steers so big they run four to the dozen. And here's the remarkable
thing about 'em--they 'ain't got as many ticks as you gentlemen."

Some of the cattlemen were incredulous, but Blaze maintained his point
with emphasis. "It's true. They're a grave disappointment to every kind
of parasite."

But Alaire had not confined her efforts to cattle; she had improved the
breed of "Box A" horses, too, and hand in hand with this work she had
carried on a series of agricultural experiments.

Las Palmas, so people used to say, lay too far up the river to be good
farming-land; nevertheless, once the pumping-plant was in, certain
parts of the ranch raised nine crops of alfalfa, and corn that stood
above a rider's head.

There was no money in "finished" stock; the border was too far from
market--that also had long been an accepted truism--yet this woman
built silos which she filled with her own excess fodder in scientific
proportions, and somehow or other she managed to ship fat beeves direct
to the packing-houses and get big prices for them.

These were but a few of her many ventures. She had her hobbies, of
course, but, oddly enough, most of them paid or promised to do so. For
instance, she had started a grove o