s of a tiny discontent.

Her life was a good example of the familiar mistake made by many a wealthy
cattle-owner. Her parents, realizing their crudity and lack of education,
had seen to it that she should be given all the advantages denied them,
and had sent her East to Chicago for eight consecutive years.

During this time, while hating the noise and confinement of the city, she
had absorbed much of its glamour, and enjoyed its alluring pleasures with
a keen appreciation. Music had been her chief study, and her very decided
talent had opened a busy career for her had she chosen to follow it.

But Julie was true to her best instincts, and refused to consider such a
thing. Her father and mother had done all in their power for her, she
reasoned, and therefore it was but fair that she should return to them and
make the closing years of their lives happy.

Though nothing had ever been said, the girl knew that when she had left
the ranch house, even for a week's visit with a girl friend two hundred
miles away, the sun might as well have fallen from the heavens,
considering the gloom that descended upon the Bar T.

It was this knowledge of their need for her that had brought her back to
fulfill what she considered her greatest happiness and duty in life.

Now, a monkey cannot wear clothes, smoke cigarettes, perform before
applauding audiences and return to the jungle without a certain feeling of
hateful unfitness among his gibbering brethren.

No more could this wild, lovely creature of the plains become one of the
most sought-after girls of Chicago's North Shore set, and return to the
painful prose of the Bar T ranch without paying the penalty.

With the glory of health and outdoor life, she had failed to realize
this, but since the sudden appearance of Bud Larkin she had done little
else.

He had brought back to her a sudden powerful nostalgia for the life she
had once known. And had old Beef Bissell been aware of this nostalgia, he
would have realized for the first time that in his desire to give his
daughter everything he had created a situation that was already
unfortunate and might, with very little prompting, be unhappy.

But this knowledge was not vouchsafed to him, and Julie certainly would
never make it plain.

The evening after Bud's departure, that same evening, in fact, when he was
fighting toward water with his flocks, the cattleman and his daughter sat
outside on the little veranda that ran across th