of a lady but rather a maid whose blood, like the
blood of the father before her, was turbulent and hot and must boil
like a wild mountain-stream at opposition. Her eyes, a little darker
than Trevors's, were the eyes of fighting stock.

Trevors, irritated already, turned hard eyes up at her from under
corrugated brows. He did not move in his chair. Nor did Lee stir
except that now he removed his hat.

"I am Trevors," said the general manager curtly. "And, whether you are
Judith Sanford or the Queen of Siam, I am busy right now."

"He got the queen idea, too!" was the quick thought back of Bud Lee's
fading smile.

"You talk soft with me, Trevors!" cried the girl passionately, "if you
want to hold your job five minutes! I'll tolerate none of your high
and mighty airs!"

Trevors laughed at her, a sneer in his laugh. "I talk the way I talk,"
he answered roughly. "If people don't like the sound of it they don't
have to listen! Lee, you round up those seventy-three horses and crowd
them over the ridge to the lumber-camp. Or, if you want to quit, quit
now and I'll send a sane man."

The hot color mounted higher in the girl's face, a new anger leaped up
in her eyes.

"Take no orders this morning that I don't give," she said, for a moment
turning her eyes upon Lee. And to Trevors: "Busy or not busy, you take
time right now to answer my questions. I've got your reports and all
they tell me is that you are going in the hole as fast as you can. You
are spending thousands of dollars needlessly. What business have you
got selling off my young steers at a sacrifice? What in the name of
folly did you build those three miles of fence for?"

"Go get those horses, Lee," said Trevors, ignoring her.

Again she spoke to Lee, saying crisply: "What horses is he talking
about?"

With his deep gravity at its deepest, Bud Lee answered: "All L-S stock.
The eleven Red Duke three-year-olds; the two Robert the Devil colts;
Brown Babe's filly, Comet----"

"All mine, every running hoof of 'em," she said, cutting in. "What
does Trevors want you to do with them? Give them away for ten dollars
a head or cut their throats?"

"Look here--" cried Trevors angrily, on his feet now.

"You shut up!" commanded the girl sharply. "Lee, you answer me."

"He's selling them fifty dollars a head," he said with a secret joy in
his heart as he glanced at Trevors's flushed face.

"Fifty dollars!" Judith gasped. "Fifty dollars for a Re