s' Association--at least none to which it
cared to carry its grievances and air them.

So they cut Alan Macdonald's fences, and other homesteaders' fences,
in the night and drove a thousand or two cattle across his fields,
trampling the growing grain and forage into the earth; they persecuted
him in a score of harassing, quick, and hidden blows. But this
homesteader was not to be driven away by ordinary means. Nature seemed
to lend a hand to him, he made crops in spite of the cattlemen, and
was prospering. He had taken root and appeared determined to remain,
and the others were taking deep root with him, and the free, wide
range was coming under the menace of the fence and the lowly plow.

That was the condition of things in those fair autumn days when
Prances Landcraft returned to the post. The Drovers' Association, and
especially the president of it, was being defied in that section,
where probably a hundred homesteaders had settled with their families
of long-backed sons and daughters. They were but a speck on the land
yet, as Chadron had told the smoky stranger when he had engaged him to
try his hand at throwing the "holy scare." But they spread far over
the upland plain, having sought the most favored spots, and they were
a blight and a pest in the eyes of the cattlemen.

Nola had flitted back to the ranchhouse, carrying Frances with her to
bring down the curtain on her summer's festivities there in one last
burst of joy. The event was to be a masquerade, and everybody from the
post was coming, together with the few from Meander who had polish
enough to float them, like new needles in a glass of water, through
frontier society's depths. Some were coming from Cheyenne, also, and
the big house was dressed for them, even to the bank of palms to
conceal the musicians, in the polite way that society has of standing
something in front of what it cannot well dispense with, yet of which
it appears to be ashamed.

It was the afternoon of the festal day, and Nola sighed happily as she
stood with Frances in the ballroom, surveying the perfection of every
detail. Money could do things away off there in that corner of the
world as well as it could do them in Omaha or elsewhere. Saul Chadron
had hothouses in which even oranges and pineapples grew.

Mrs. Chadron was in the living-room, with its big fireplace and homely
things, when they came chattering out of the enchanted place. She was
sitting by the window which gave her