she had a right to expect seemed to grow higher and more
impassable daily.

After receiving official notification of his nomination, Lawler had gone
away on a speaking tour of the state, and Ruth had seen little of him.
He came home once, for a few days, just before the election, and had
renewed his pleas to Ruth. But the girl, rigidly adhering to her
determination not to permit the shadow of her father's reputation to
embarrass him, had firmly refused to consent. And after the election,
when he had gone to the capital to take the office to which he had been
chosen by a record vote, she watched him ride away with a consciousness
that the world had grown to gigantic proportions and that Lawler was
going to its extreme farther limits, leaving behind him a gulf of space,
endless and desolate.

Dorgan, the country prosecutor, had been defeated for re-election by a
man named Carney--who was known to be friendly to Singleton. Moreton had
also been defeated--by "Slim" McCray, who hailed from a little town
called Keegles, southeast from Willets. It was rumored--after the
election--that Slim McCray had been friendly to Antrim, though no one
advanced any evidence in support of the rumor.

McCray--because Willets was the county seat--came to the office that had
formerly been Moreton's, immediately following his election. He was
slender, tall, and unprepossessing, and instantly created a bad
impression.

This news came to Ruth through her father, for she had not visited town
since she had gone there to help Mrs. Lawler care for her son. She felt
that she did not dare to leave the cabin. For one night, after her
father had acted strangely, he got up suddenly and went out of the door.
And after a while, growing suspicious, she blew out the light and
stepped softly outside, to see him, at a little distance from the house,
talking with Singleton.

That incident had occurred shortly after Lawler had departed for the
capital to assume his duties as governor. She suspected her father had
talked with Singleton since, though she had never seen them together
from that time until now.

Lawler had been gone a month. She had heard through various
mediums--mostly from cowboys from nearby ranches who occasionally passed
the cabin--that Lawler was "making good"--in the vernacular of the
cowpuncher; and "makin' them all set up an' take notice." Those terms,
of course, would seem to indicate that Lawler was a good governor and
that he was a