and the picture rose up before him all
complete. I told that same yarn afterward to Barney MacTague, and there
was nothing to it, so far as he was concerned. He said: "Lord! they must
have been an out-at-heels lot not to have any clothes of their own." Now,
what do you think of that?

Well, I went on from that and told dad about my flying trips through
King's Highway, too--with the girl left out. Dad matched his finger-tips
together while I was telling it, and afterward he didn't say much; only:
"I knew you'd play the fool somehow, if you stayed long enough." He didn't
explain, however, just what particular brand of fool I had been, or what
he thought of old King, though I hinted pretty strong. Dad has got a
smooth way of parrying anything he doesn't want to answer straight out,
and it takes a fellow with more nerve than I've got to corner him and just
make him give up an opinion if he doesn't want to. So I didn't find out a
thing about that old row, or how it started--more than what I'd learned at
the Ragged H, that is.

Frosty had written me, a week or two after I left, that our fellows had
really burned King's sheds, and that Perry Potter had a bullet just scrape
the hair off the top of his head, where he hadn't any to spare. It made
him so mad, Frosty said, that he wanted to go back and kill, slay, and
slaughter--that is Frosty's way of putting it. Another one of the boys had
been hit in the arm, but it was only a flesh wound and nothing serious. So
far as they could find out, King's men had got off without a scratch,
Frosty said; which was another great sorrow to Perry Potter, who went
around saying pointed things about poor markmanship and fellows who
couldn't hit a barn if they were locked inside--that kept the boys stirred
up and undecided whether to feel insulted or to take it as a joke.
I wished that I was back there--until I read, down at the bottom of the
last page, that Beryl King and her Aunt Lodema had gone back to the East.

The next day I learned the same thing from another source. Edith Loroman
had kept her promise--as I remembered her, she wasn't great at that sort
of thing, either--and sent me a picture of White Divide just before I left
the ranch. Somehow, after that, we drifted into letter-writing. I wrote to
thank her for the picture, and she wrote back to say "don't mention
it"--in effect, at least, though it took three full pages to get that
effect--and asked some questions about the ranch, and