sticated girl might easily think
Keith in earnest, with that look in his eyes.

Dorman, scowling at them over his shoulder, unconsciously did his
divinity a service. Beatrice pursed her lips in a way that drove Keith
nearly wild, and took up the weapon of silence.

"You said you women are alone--where is milord?" Keith began again,
after two minutes of lying there watching her.

"Sir Redmond is in Helena, on business. He's been making arrangements to
lease a lot of land."

"Ah-h!" Keith snapped a twig off a dead willow.

"We look for him home to-day, and Dick drove in to meet the train."

"So the Pool has gone to leasing land?" The laugh had gone out of
Keith's eyes; they were clear and keen.

"Yes--the plan is to lease the Pine Ridge country, and fence it. I
suppose you know where that is."

"I ought to," Keith said quietly. "It's funny Dick never mentioned it."

"It isn't Dick's idea," Beatrice told him. "It was Sir Redmond's. Dick
is rather angry, I think, and came near quarreling with Sir Redmond
about it. But English capital controls the Pool, you know, and Sir
Redmond controls the English capital, so he can adopt whatever policy
he chooses. The way he explained the thing to me, it seems a splendid
plan--don't you think so?"

"Yes." Keith's tone was not quite what he meant it to be; he did not
intend it to be ironical, as it was. "It's a snap for the Pool, all
right. It gives them a cinch on the best of the range, and all the
water. I didn't give milord credit for such business sagacity."

Beatrice leaned over that she might read his eyes, but Keith turned
his face away. In the shock of what he had just learned, he was, at the
moment, not the lover; he was the small cattleman who is being forced
out of the business by the octopus of combined capital. It was not less
bitter that the woman he loved was one of the tentacles reaching out to
crush him. And they could do it; they--the whole affair resolved itself
into a very simple scheme, to Keith. The gauntlet had been thrown
down--because of this girl beside him. It was not so much business
acumen as it was the antagonism of a rival that had prompted the move.
Keith squared his shoulders, and mentally took up the gauntlet. He might
lose in the range fight, but he would win the girl, if it were in the
power of love to do it.

"Why that tone? I hope it isn't--will it inconvenience you?"

"Oh, no. No, not at all. No--" Keith seemed to forget that a
supera