solemn rebuke for
his levity, speaking a truer word than she was aware.

CHAPTER III

THE RANCHHOUSE BY THE RIVER

Saul Chadron had built himself into that house. It was a solid and
assertive thing of rude importance where it stood in the great plain,
the river lying flat before it in its low banks like a gray thread
through the summer green. There was a bold front to the house, and a
turret with windows, standing like a lighthouse above the sea of
meadows in which his thousand-numbered cattle fed.

As white as a dove it sat there among the cottonwoods at the
riverside. A stream of water led into its gardens to gladden them and
give them life. Years ago, when Chadron's importance was beginning to
feel itself strong upon its legs, and when Nola was a little thing
with light curls blowing about her blue eyes, the house had grown up
under the wand of riches in that barren place.

The post at Fort Shakie had been the nearest neighbor in those days,
and it remained the nearest neighbor still, with the exception of one
usurper and outcast homesteader, Alan Macdonald by name, who had
invaded the land over which Chadron laid his extensive claim. Fifteen
miles up the river from the grand white house Macdonald had strung his
barbed wire and carried in the irrigation ditch to his alfalfa field.
He had chosen the most fertile spot in the vast plain through which
the river swept, and it was in the heart of Saul Chadron's domain.

After the lordly manner of the cattle "barons," as they were called in
the Northwest, Chadron set his bounds by mountains and rivers.
Twenty-five hundred square miles, roughly measured, lay within his
lines, the Alamito Ranch he called it--the Little Cottonwood. He had
no more title to that great sweep of land than the next man who might
come along, and he paid no rental fee to nation nor state for grazing
his herds upon it. But the cattle barons had so apportioned the land
between themselves, and Saul Chadron, and each member of the Drovers'
Association, had the power of their mighty organization to uphold his
hand. That power was incontestable in the Northwest in its day; there
was no higher law.

This Alan Macdonald was an unaccountable man, a man of education, it
was said, which made him doubly dangerous in Saul Chadron's eyes. Saul
himself had come up from the saddle, and he was not strong on letters,
but he had seen the power of learning in lawyers' offices, and he
respected it, and