his shoulders and set his feet upon the uphill trail.

He realized to the full the tribute Mason paid to his innate
trustworthiness by leaving him there, master of the ranch and guardian
of his household god--and goddess, to say nothing of Josephine, whom
Mason openly admired and looked upon as one of the family.

Of a truth, it would seem that she had really become so. Ford had
gathered, bit by bit, the information that she was quite alone in the
world, so far as immediate relatives were concerned, and that she was
Kate's cousin, and that Kate insisted that this was to be her home, from
now on. Josephine's ankle was well enough now so that she was often to
be met in unexpected places about the ranch, he discovered. And though
she was not friendly, she was less openly antagonistic than she had
been--and when all was said and done, eminently able to take care of
herself.

So also was Kate, for that matter. No sooner was her beloved Chester out
of sight over the hill a mile away, than Mrs. Kate dried her wifely
tears and laid hold of her scepter with a firmness that amused Ford
exceedingly. She ordered Dick up to work in the depressed-looking area
before the house, which she called her flower garden, a task which Dick
seemed perfectly willing to perform, by the way--although his assistance
would have been more than welcome at other work than tying scraggly rose
bushes and protecting them from the winter already at hand.

As to Buddy, he surely would have resented, more keenly than the women,
the implication that he needed any one to take care of him. Buddy's
allegiance to Ford was wavering, at that time. Dick had gone to some
trouble to alter an old pair of chaps so that Buddy could wear them, and
his star was in the ascendant; a pair of chaps with fringes were, in
Buddy's estimation, a surer pledge of friendship and favor than the
privilege of feeding a lame horse.

Buddy was rather terrible, sometimes. He had a way of standing back
unnoticed, and of listening when he was believed to be engrossed in his
play. Afterward he was apt to say the things which should not be said;
in other words, he was the average child of seven, living without
playmates, and so forced by his environment to interest himself in the
endless drama played by the grown-ups around him. Buddy, therefore, was
not unusually startling, one day at dinner, when he looked up from
spatting his potato into a flat cake on his plate.

"What hill you goin