of? What
have I done to you that you can't be decent? Here I am only putting
foot on my own land and you make me feel like an intruder."

"I am answering your questions."

"Like a half-animated trained iceberg, yes. Can't you act like a human
being? Oh, I've got your number, Bud Lee, and you are just as narrow
between the horns as the rest of the outfit. You are narrow and
prejudiced and blindly unreasonable! I know as much about ranching as
any man of you; I know more about this outfit because the best man that
ever set foot on it, and that's Luke Sanford, taught me every crook,
and bend of it; and now, just because I'm a girl and not a boy, you
stand off like I had the smallpox; just when I need loyalty and
understanding and when, the Lord knows, I've already got a double
handful of trouble, I can't count for a minute on men that have been
taking my pay for months! Get some of the mildew and cobwebs out of
your head and tell me this: What reason in the world is there why you
choose to think I haven't any business wearing my own shoes?"

"That's sure putting it straight," said Lee slowly.

"You just bet it's putting it straight!" she announced vigorously.
"And you'll find that it's a way I have, putting things straight. I
was trained to the business by a better man than you'll ever be, Bud
Lee."

"Maybe so," he admitted without heat. "I'll take off my hat to Luke
Sanford for a man. And I'll take off my hat to you, if you want to
know. But, training or no training, this is no job for a lady, and
shooting up Trevors and riding the Prince isn't going to make it so.
Sure enough it's none of my butt-in what sort of thing you do. But at
the same time there's no call for me to say you're doing fine when I
don't see it that way."

"What you're looking for," sniffed Judith contemptuously, "is a female
being extinct this one hundred years! You'd have every girl wear tails
to her gowns, and duck and dodge behind fans and faint every time she
jabbed her thumb with a pin!"

"I can't see that a woman's place is riding bucking broncos and
rampsing around. . . ."

"A woman's place!" she scoffed. "Her place where a blunder-headed man
puts her! How do you know what her place is? Do you suppose the blood
in a healthy-bodied, healthy-minded woman is any different from your
blood? How would you like to be told just what your place is? To be
jammed, for instance, into a little bungalow in a city; to be squeezed