ived a good deal at the ranch. You could tell by the low, green bungalow
with wide, screened porches and light cream trim, that was almost an
exact reproduction of the bungalow in Los Angeles. A man and woman who
have lived long together on a ranch like the Rolling R would have gone on
living contentedly in the adobe house which was now abandoned to the sole
occupancy of the boys. It is the young lady of the family who demands
up-to-date housing.

So the bungalow stood there in the glaring sun, surrounded by a scrap of
lawn which the Arizona winds whipped and buffeted with sand and wind all
summer, and vines which the wind tousled into discouragement. And fifty
yards away squatted the old adobe house in the sand, with a tree at each
front corner and a narrow porch extending from one to the other.

Beyond the adobe, toward the sheltering bluff, a clutter of low sheds,
round-pole corrals, a modern barn of fair size, and beside it a square
corral of planks and stout, new posts, continued the tale of how progress
was joggling the elbow of picturesqueness. Sudden's father had built the
adobe and the oldest sheds and corrals, when he took all the land he
could lawfully hold under government claims. Later he had bought more;
and Sudden, growing up and falling heir to it all, had added tract after
tract by purchase and lease and whatever other devices a good politician
may be able to command.

Sudden's father had been a simple man, content to run his ranch along
the lines of least resistance, and to take what prosperity came to him
in the natural course of events. Sudden had organized a Company, had
commercialized his legacy, had "married money," and had made money. Far
to the north and to the east and west ran the lines of other great
ranches, where sheep were handled in great, blatting bands and yielded
a fortune in wool. There were hills where Selmer cattle were wild as
deer--cattle that never heard the whistle of a locomotive until they were
trailed down to the railroad to market.

These made the money for Selmer and his Company. But it was the Rolling
R, where the profits were smaller, that stood closest to Sudden's heart.
There was not so much money in horses as there was in sheep; Sudden
admitted it readily enough. But he hated sheep; hated the sound of them
and the smell of them and the insipid, questioning faces of them. And
he loved horses; loved the big-jointed, wabbly legged colts and the
round-bodied, anxious mo