e,
no matter how we are situated. The most dreary and uncolored existence,
in all probability, there is in the world to-day is the daily life of a
real prince or princess. We look longingly over the fence of our desires
and consider all sorts and conditions of people outside as happier and
far better off than we.

That was the way it was with Frances. Especially on this particular
night.

Her unexpected meeting with Pratt Sanderson had brought to her heart and
mind more strongly than for months her experiences in Amarillo. She
remembered her school days, her school fellows, and the difference
between their lives and that which she lived at present.

Probably half the girls she had known at school would be delighted (or
thought they would) to change places with Frances of the ranges, right
then. But the ranch girl thought how much better off she would be if she
were continuing her education under the care of people who could place
her in a more cultivated life.

Not that she was disloyal, even in thought, to her father. She loved him
intensely--passionately! But the life of the ranges, after her taste of
school and association with cultivated people, could not be entirely
satisfactory.

So she sat, huddled in a white wool wrapper, by the barred, open window,
looking out across the plain. Only for the few lights at the corrals and
bunk-house, it seemed a great, horizonless sea of darkness--for there
was no moon and a haze had enveloped the high stars since twilight.

No sound came to her ears at first. There is nothing so soundless as
night on the plains--unless there be beasts near, either tamed or wild.

No coyote slunk about the ranch-house. The horses were still in the
corrals. The cattle were all too far distant to be heard. Not even the
song of a sleepy puncher, as he wheeled around the herd, drifted to the
barred window of Frances' room.

Her second topic for thought was her father's evident expectation that
the ranch-house might be attacked. Every stranger was an object of
suspicion to him.

This did not abate one jot his natural Western hospitality. As mark his
open-handed reception of Pratt Sanderson on this evening. They kept open
house at the Bar-T ranch. But after dark--or, after bedtime at
least--the place was barred like a fort in the Indian country!

Captain Rugley never went to his bed save after making the rounds, armed
as he had been to-night, with Ming to bolt the doors. The only way a
mar