dship would bear any
strain.

O'Ryan recovered himself from the moment he saw the back curtain, and he
did not find any fun in the thing. It took a hold on him out of all
proportion to its importance. He realized that he had come to the parting
of the ways in his life. It suddenly came upon him that something had been
lacking in him in the past, and that his want of success in many things
had not been wholly due to bad luck. He had been eager, enterprising, a
genius almost at seeing good things; and yet others had reaped where he
had sown. He had believed too much in his fellow-man. For the first time
in his life he resented the friendly, almost affectionate satire of his
many friends. It was amusing, it was delightful; but down beneath it all
there was a little touch of ridicule. He had more brains than any of them,
and he had known it in a way; he had led them sometimes, too, as on raids
against cattle-stealers, and in a brush with half-breeds and Indians; as
when he stood for the legislature; but he felt now for the first time that
he had not made the most of himself, that there was something hurting to
self-respect in this prank played upon him. When he came to that point his
resentment went higher. He thought of Molly Mackinder, and he heard all
too acutely the vague veiled references to her in their satire. By the
time Gow Johnson spoke he had mastered himself, however, and had made up
his mind. He stood still for a moment.

"Now, please, my cue," he said, quietly and satirically from the trees
near the wings.

He was smiling, but Gow Johnson's prognostication was right; and ere long
the audience realized that he was right. There was standing before them
not the Terry O'Ryan they had known, but another. He threw himself fully
into his part--a young rancher made deputy-sheriff, who by the occasional
exercise of his duty had incurred the hatred of a small floating
population that lived by fraud, violence, and cattle-stealing. The
conspiracy was to raid his cattle, to lure him to pursuit, to ambush him,
and kill him. Terry now played the part with a naturalness and force which
soon lifted the play away from the farcical element introduced into it by
those who had interpolated the gibes at himself. They had gone a step too
far.

"He's going large," said Gow Johnson, as the act drew near its close and
the climax neared where O'Ryan was to enter upon a physical struggle with
his assailants. "His blood's up. There'll