hampered by any
definite form of it concentrated upon one girl.

For all that he had timed his trip so as to arrive at the Whipple
shack just about the time when Mary Hope would be starting home. He
was curious to see just how much or how little she had changed; to
know whether she still had that funny little Scotch accent that
manifested itself in certain phrasings, certain vowel sounds at
variance with good English pronunciation. He wanted to know just how
much Pocatello had done to spoil her. Beneath all was the primal
instinct of the young male dimly seeking the female whom his destiny
had ordained to be his mate.

As a young fellow shut in behind the Rim, with the outside world a
vast area over which his imagination wandered vaguely, Mary Hope had
appealed to him. She was the one girl in the Black Rim country whom he
would ride out of his way to meet, whose face, whose voice, lingered
with him pleasantly for days after he had seen her and talked with
her. He reflected, between snatches of song, that he might have
thought himself in love with Mary Hope, might even have married her,
had Belle not suddenly decided that he should go beyond the Rim and
learn the things she could not teach him. Belle must have wanted him,
her youngest, to be different from the rest. He wondered with a sudden
whimsical smile, whether she was satisfied with the result of his two
years of exile. Tom, he suspected, was not,--nor were Duke and Al.
The three seemed to hold themselves apart from him, to look upon him
as a guest rather than as one of the family returned after an absence.
They did not include him in their talk of range matters and the
business of the ranch. He had once observed in them a secret
embarrassment when he appeared unexpectedly, had detected a swift
change of tone and manner and subject.

Surely they could not think he had changed sufficiently to make him an
outsider, he meditated. Aside from his teasing of Belle, he had
dropped deliberately into the range vernacular, refraining only from
certain crudities of speech which grated on his ears. He had put on
his old clothes, he had tried to take his old place in the ranch work.
He had driven a four-horse team up the Ridge trail with lumber for the
schoolhouse, and had negotiated the rock descent to Cottonwood Spring
with a skill that pleased him mightily because it proved to him--and
to Tom and the boys--that his range efficiency had not lessened during
his absence. He