his health,
but he came too late, and died, leaving me the claim on the Sage Brush
and my pledge on his death-bed never to leave the West, for fear I, too,
would become an invalid as he had been. There seems to be little danger
of that, and I like the West too well to leave it now. And then,
besides, I'm like a lot of other fellows who claim to love the Sage
Brush. I haven't the means to get away and start life anywhere else,
anyhow. You see, we are as frank out here about our conditions as you
Philadelphians are."

He smiled and looked down at his strong hands and sturdy arms. It would
be difficult to think of Joe Thomson as an invalid.

"I inherited, besides my claim and my promise, the provision for two
younger sisters, housed with relatives in the East, but supported by
contributions from this same Sage Brush claim on which I have had to
wrestle with the heat and drought that sear the prairies. And now, when
both my sisters, who married young, are provided for and settled in
homes of their own, and I can begin to live my own life a little, comes
my enemy, the blowout--"

"Oh, I never want to think of that awful thing!" Jerry cried. "I shall
give the Macpherson Mortgage Company control of the entire sand-pile.
I'll never play there again, never!"

In the silence that followed something in the beauty of the midsummer
night seemed to fall like a benediction on this man and this woman, each
facing big realities. And, however different their equipment for their
struggles had been in previous years, they were not so far apart now as
their differing circumstances of life would indicate.

"I must be going now. I did not mean to take so much of your time. I
came only to assure you that I am not always so rude as the mood you
found me in the other day would indicate." Joe rose to go with the
words.

Jerry's mind had run back again, dreamily, to Gene Wellington, of
Philadelphia, the Gene as she knew and remembered him. It was not until
afterward that she recalled her surprise that this ranchman of the
Western prairies should have such a simple and easy manner whose home
life had evidently been so unlike her own.

"You haven't stayed too long," she said, frankly. "And you haven't yet
suggested what an undertrained Philadelphia girl can do to keep the
coyote from her dugout portal."

If only she had been a little less bewitchingly pretty, a little less
sure that the distance of planet from planet lay between them, a s