ey came in his way. But they only hinted, for unless they could
prove beyond the doubt of any twelve men in the county that his brand
was burned on any cattle save his own, they had no wish to offend. For
young Tom had learned well his three lessons from the fate of his
three brothers; his gun never stuck in its holster; he was wily and
not to be caught; he could neither be harried nor coaxed into setting
aside his own judgment while it seemed to him good.

You would think that young Tom would speedily find himself a mate
amongst the girls of the Black Rim country,--though they were as
scarce as princesses of the royal blood and choice was of necessity
restricted to a half-dozen or so. None of the girls he knew pleased
his fancy, untrained though that fancy might be. Instinct told him
that they were too tame, too commonplace to hold his interest for
long. A breathless dance or two, a kiss stolen in a shadowy corner,
and blushes and giggles and inane remonstrances that bored him
because he knew they would come. Tom had reached the sere age of
twenty-two when he began to wonder if he must go beyond the Black Rim
world for his wife, or resign himself to the fate of an old bachelor.
None of the Black Rim girls, he told himself grimly, should ever have
a share in that million.

Then that purple-lidded, putty-face jade we call Fate whimsically sent
him a mate; curious, I suppose, to see what would happen when the two
whose trails had lain so far apart should meet.

A girl from some far city she was; a small star that had twinkled
behind the footlights and had fled--or had fallen--to the Black Rim
country. Like many another, she had gone as far as her money would
take her. That it took her to the end of the little branch railroad
that stopped abruptly with its nose against a mountain twenty miles
from the Devil's Tooth ranch was a coincidence,--or the whim of Fate.
There she was, as strange to the outland as young Tom would have been
to the city whence she had come; thinking perhaps to start life afresh
in some little Western town; with no money to carry her back to the
outskirts of civilization, and no town wherein she might win fresh
successes. The train that had brought her panted upon a siding,
deserted, its boiler cooling, its engineer, fireman, conductor and
brakeman leaning over a bar in the shack that called itself a saloon.
To-morrow it would rattle back to the junction, if all went well and
the rails held fast to