he slushy operation. "Carolyn June and me
both have blamed near rubbed our fingers off trying to get it to look
right again but somehow or other it don't seem to work."

"Did you put bluing in your rinse water?" Ophelia asked with a laugh.

"Bluing?" Carolyn June and Skinny questioned together. "What does that
do to it?"

"Bleaches it--makes it white," the widow replied with another laugh as
she returned to the front room.

"By golly, maybe that's what it needs!" Skinny exclaimed hopefully.

"Of course," Carolyn June cried gaily. "How silly we were not to think
of it! Any one ought to know you put bluing in the water when you wash
things. Wonder if Sing Pete has any around anywhere?"

They searched the kitchen shelves and found a pint bottle, nearly full,
of the liquid indigo compound.

"How much do you suppose we ought to put in?" Carolyn June asked,
pulling the cork from the bottle and holding it poised over the pan of
water in which the shirt, a slimy, dingy mass, floated drunkenly.

"Darned if I know," Skinny said, scratching his head. "She said it would
make it white--I reckon the more you put in the whiter the blamed
thing'll be. Try about half of it at first and see how 'it works!"

"Gee, isn't it pretty?" Carolyn June gurgled as she tipped the bottle
and the waves of indigo spread through the water, covering the shirt
with a deep crystalline blue.

"You bet!" Skinny exclaimed. "That ought to fix it!"

It did.

The shirt, when finally dried, was a wonderful thing--done in a sort of
mottled, streaky, marbled sky and cloud effect.

But Skinny wore it, declaring he liked it better--that it more nearly
matched the shamrock tie--than when it was "too darned white and
everything!"

To Parker and the boys on the beef hunt everything was business.

The days were filled with hard riding as they gathered the cattle,
bunched the fat animals, cut out and turned back those unfit for the
market, stood guard at night over the herd, steadily and rapidly cleaned
the west half of the Kiowa range of the stuff that was ready to sell.

It was supper-time on one of the last days of the round-up.

The outfit was camped at Dry Buck. Bed rolls, wrapped in dingy gray
tarpaulins or black rubber ponchos, were scattered about marking the
places where each cowboy that night would sleep. The herd was bunched a
quarter of a mile away in a little cove backed by the rim of sand-hills.
Captain Jack and Silver Tip, riderless but