action. That had happened to him more than once, and it
only seemed to sharpen the pleasure of being snowed in at a place like
Alamito, where the kitchen was fat and the hand of the host free. He
smiled as he turned to the kitchen to wash his face and soap his
hair.

They passed a very pleasant afternoon at the ranchhouse, in spite of
Mrs. Chadron's uneasiness on account of their defenseless state. At
that season Chadron and his neighbors could not draw very heavily on
their scattered forces following the divided herds spread out over the
vast territory for the winter grazing.

The twenty men gathered in a hurry-call by Chadron to avenge the
defeat of Chance Dalton, who had in their turn been met and
unexpectedly repulsed by the homesteaders, as Chadron had related in
his own way to Colonel Landcraft, were lying in camp several miles up
the river. That is, all that were left of them fit for duty after the
fight. A good many of them were limping, and would limp for many a
day.

They were waiting the arrival of the troops, which they expected with
the same confidence Mrs. Chadron had held before Nola brought her an
explanation that covered the confusion of refusal.

Neither of the young women knew of the tiff between the colonel and
Chadron, for the colonel was a man who kept his family apart from his
business. Chadron had not seen fit to uncover his humiliation to his
daughter, but had told her that he was acting on the advice of Colonel
Landcraft in sending to his friends in Cheyenne for men to put down
the uprising of rustlers himself.

So there were comfortable enough relations between them all at the
ranch as the day bent to evening and the red sunset changed to gray.
Banjo played for them, as he had done that other afternoon, and sang
his sentimental songs in voice that quavered in the feeling passages.
Chadron had not left anybody to guard the house, because he knew very
well that Macdonald considered nothing beyond defense, and that he
would as quickly burn his own mother's roof above her head as he would
set torch to that home by the riverside.

"Sing us that dreamy one, Banjo," Nola requested, "the one that begins
'Come sit by my side little--' you know the one I mean."

A sentimental tenderness came into Banjo's face. He turned his head so
that he could look out of the window into the thickening landscape
beyond the corral gate, gray and mysterious and unfriendly now as a
twilight sea. Nola touched Fra