d feet.

"Bud," she said at last, "you've never known me to tell anything but the
truth, and I'm going to tell it to you now. I will be your friend in
everything except where you ask me to yield my loyalty to my father and
his interests. He is the most wonderful father a girl ever had, and if he
were to say that black was white, I should probably swear to it if he
asked me to."

"I admire you for that," said Bud genuinely, although all his hopes in
this powerful ally went glimmering. "Let's not talk shop any longer. It's
too good just to see you to think about anything but that."

So, for a while, they reminisced of the days of their former friendship,
by tacit agreement avoiding any reference to intimate things. And Larkin
felt spring up in him the old love that he had convinced himself was dead;
so that he added to his first resolution to succeed on the range, a
second, that he would, in the end, conquer Juliet Bissell.

The thought was pleasing, for it meant another struggle, another outlet
for the energies and activities that had so long lain dormant in him. And
with the undaunted courage of youth he looked eagerly toward the battle
that should win this radiant girl.

But for the present he knew he must not betray himself by word, look or
action; other things of greater moment must be settled.

At last, as they talked, the cook, a long-suffering Chinaman, seized a
huge brass bell and rang it with all his might, standing in the door of
the cook house.

There was an instant response in the wild whoop of the cowboys who had
been suffering the pangs of starvation for the past half-hour.

"Of course you must come to our private table, Bud," said Juliet. "I want
you to see father's other side." So they rose and went in the front way.

The ranch house had been planned so that to the right of the entrance was
the living-room, and back of that the dining-room. To the left three
smaller rooms had been made into sleeping apartments. At the back of the
structure and extending across the width of it was a large room that, in
the early days of the Bar T, had served as the bunk-house for the cow
punchers.

This had now been changed to the mess-room for them, while the family,
with the addition of Stelton, the foreman, used the smaller private room.
Owing to the large increase in the number of Bar T punchers a special
bunk-house had been built in the rear of the main structure.

At table Larkin for the first time met Mr