rom his pocket.

"There's something here I'm sorry you'll have to know," he said. "You
won't understand how low the meaning of most of it is; but I'm sorry
they hit you to try and hurt me."

He threw himself down in a big leather chair. She took the paper
mechanically and sat on the arm of the chair to read. She read slowly
and deliberately to the end. Then she re-read both columns; and the
paper fell from her hands. She did not know it, but the same
suppressed fury was blazing in her face as she had seen on his at the
stage door.

"So that is what was doing when I went to the Senator's office this
afternoon to plead with him that things could not go on in the old
plundering way. That is what his man's visit meant here the other day
to express sympathy with you for the loss of the sheep? Now I
understand what the loafers at the station meant, and the driver's
unfriendliness, and those unclean women; and to think they framed it
all out of that innocent coat. You know, father, Mr. Wayland had
carried Fordie down from the Rim Rocks. We carried the body in
together."

"Where is Wayland?" asked MacDonald; and she poured out the full story
of all that had happened. I hope, gentle reader, you will please to
observe that if the father had viewed the facts of that recital through
the same tainted mind as Mr. Bat Brydges, a breach would have occurred
that neither time nor regret could have bridged. I confess when I see
breaches occur that wrench lives and break hearts through love
harboring suspicion, I don't think the love is very much worth the
name. You can't both have your plant grow, and keep tearing up the
roots to see if they are growing. You can't both throw mud in a spring
and drink out of a well of love undefiled. If love grows by what it
feeds on, so does suspicion. He did not once look up questioningly to
her eyes. Instead, he reached up and took hold of her hand. For the
first time in their lives, father and daughter came together.

"But there is one thing you are mistaken about, father. They did not
hit me, to hurt you. They hit me, to stop Dick Wayland."

"Why, what difference can you make to Wayland?"

She hid her face on his shoulder.

"I love him," she said.

When the German cook came in with the washed dishes, father and
daughter still sat in the big arm chair; and you may depend on it, that
flunky carried out to the ranch hands, guzzling over the evening paper
in the bunk house