is no such word as cost," he said.

CHAPTER XXV

THE THREADS MEET

It could not have been later than ten o'clock in the morning when a
puncher with sharp eyes might have seen two figures approaching the Bar T
ranch house on horseback. They rode needlessly close together and swung
their clasped and gauntleted hands like happy children.

One was a girl into whose radiant eyes a new wonder had come, and the
other a handsome, tanned young man bathed in a deliriously happy
expression.

"Isn't it jolly to be married without anyone's knowing?" cried Julie. "Oh,
but won't they be surprised at home?"

"Rather!" remarked Bud, with a sobered expression. "I only hope your
father doesn't widow you just as I ride into the yard with the olive
branch."

"Stop it, Bud! What puts such awful thoughts into your head?"

"Experience. Your father was so mad about my getting the sheep across the
river that he started his punchers walking home that same night, and
nobody has seen him since."

Larkin spoke the truth, but little exaggerated. Beef Bissell, humiliated,
beaten, and forced to accept the small end of a deal for once in his life,
had started from the useless cowmen's camp by the Gray Bull the very night
of the crossing. He ordered the men to follow and round up their stampeded
horses and then to ride home.

Meanwhile he appropriated one horse that had not been in the corral and
trotted homeward, eaten by chagrin and beside himself with impotent fury.

Bud and Julie had found this out the day of their talk concerning Lester,
when they forded the stream on horses and asked for Bissell. Under the
circumstances Bud developed a genius for inspiration that was little short
of marvelous.

"What's the use of riding all the way home and having a grand row with
your father?" he asked. "Why not go over to Rattlesnake, where there's a
sky-pilot, and be married? Then we'll go home, and there can't be any row,
because there will only be one party in the mood for it."

But the girl demurred. It was cruel to her father and mother, she said,
not to have them present on the greatest day of her life. She allowed it
was mighty ungrateful after all they had done for her. Then Bud took her
hand in his and told her his principal reasons.

"I'm a business man, honey, and I've got to start north after Simmy and
the sheep in three or four days," he said. "Shearing is late now, but I
guess we can make it. This trouble has set me behind c