into a dress-suit and told 'Stay there and look sweet'; to be commanded
not to get up a natural sweat, nor to kick over the traces with which
some woman had hitched you to the cart of convention. How'd _you_ like
it, Bud Lee?"

Bud Lee grinned and a new look crept into his eyes. "Being Bud Lee,"
he answered frankly, "I wouldn't stand it for one little tick of the
clock! If you want me to swap talk with you; all day at ninety bucks a
month, all right. I'd say there's two kinds of men, too. There's my
kind; there's the Dave Burril Lee kind. You see, he's a sort of
relation of mine, is Dave Burril Lee, and I'm not exactly proud of him.
He's the kind that wears dress-suits and sticks in a bungalow. He's
proud of his name Burril and Lee, both, because big men down South wore
'em before he did, and they were relations. He's swelled up over the
way he can dance and ride after a fox, and over the coin he's got in
the bank. Then there's Bud Lee who ducks out of that sort of a
scrap-heap and beats it for the open."

"I get you!" broke in Judith, her eyes very bright. "And you men here,
my men, want me to be the sort of woman that your precious cousin, Dave
Burril, is a man? Is that it? Where's your logic this morning?"

"Meaning horse sense?" he smiled. "It's in these few little words:
'What's right for a man may be dead wrong for a woman.'"

"Oh, scat!" she cried impatiently. "What am I wasting time with you
for? You're right when you say that if I am paying you ninety dollars
a month and grub and blankets I'd better get something out of you
besides talk." She swung back to her table. "What was Trevors's
latest excuse for selling at a sacrifice?" she asked, her tone dry and
businesslike. "Why was he selling those horses at fifty dollars a
head?"

"Told me he just had a wire last night from Young Hampton, asking for
three thousand," he explained in a similar tone, though his eyes were
twinkling at her.

"Pollock Hampton has his nerve!" she snapped. She took up the
telephone instrument at her elbow and demanded the Western Union at
Rocky Bend. "Judith Sanford speaking," she said crisply. "Repeat the
message of last night for the general manager, Blue Lake Ranch."

In a moment she had it. "So Trevors wasn't lying about that part of
it," she said reluctantly. And to the Western Union agent, "Take this
message:

POLLOCK HAMPTON, Hotel Glennlyn, San Francisco:

Impossible send money now or for some