ling and they would celebrate any time at
anybody's expense--except their own; Carpy could believe it was to
usher in a better feeling--everyone to his taste.

But the suspicious, because they did not quite understand such a move,
harbored their suspicions, and among the doubting was Belle
Shockley--shrewd and very much alive to the drift of things since her
struggle with a cyclone. Had Belle, instead of Kate, been out at the
ranch, things now coming along that Kate failed to see, would have told
volumes to her.

But Kate did not feel at liberty to make of Belle a confidant in
everything--certainly not in what happened at home; so she neither said
anything to Belle nor asked of her any explanation of things that she
herself did not understand--such as guarded and more frequent
consultations between her father and Van Horn, Pettigrew and Stone; and
such as men riding up with a clatter to the ranch-house at night and
calling Doubleday out and calling for Van Horn who often now spent the
night at the ranch and left before daybreak.

Some of this, Kate saw. She could see how absent-minded her father
was. He grew so taciturn she hardly knew him but the reason for it was
beyond her. More than she saw, she picked up from Bradley, working
then at the ranch. Bradley had taken a liking to Kate and often
reminded her of the night he brought her into the Falling Wall country.

Whenever she was in Sleepy Cat, Belle was inquisitive. She always
wanted to know what Van Horn was doing, what her father was doing, and
then fell back on vaguely general questions about ranches and the range
and rustlers. More than once she spoke of strangers in town, Texas
men--cowboys and gunmen she called them--who bothered her for meals,
and whom she scornfully sent packing.

And Henry Sawdy, too, one of her frequent visitors, was trying to court
her, she complained; all this made her suspicious. Of whom? Of what?
Kate asked. Belle could not tell exactly of whom, of what--she was
just suspicious: "Why should that big fat man come courting me?" she
demanded one day when Kate had come in for lunch.

"You don't think it possible he likes you?" suggested Kate, barely
glancing Belle's way, and taking care to make her tone very skeptical.
Belle only snorted contemptuously and turned to her cooking; but as she
did so, she gave her wig a punch.

By the merest chance, John Lefever came in a few minutes later. Belle
and Kate were at the table. J