ead and looked at him wonderingly.

"What is it, Mr. Conniston? What makes you act so strangely? Don't you
want to ride with me?"

He touched his hat with mock solemnity.

"I did not know that you wanted me to. I imagined that the hired man's
place--"

"Oh, nonsense!" she broke in, impatiently. And with a swift smile
which was so faint, so elusive that it was gone before he could be
sure that he had not imagined it, "I thought that you were going--that
we were going to be friends."

"That was ages ago," he retorted, bitterly. "Ages before I turned into
a dollar-a-day laborer. Before I went to work for your father, Miss
Crawford."

"And that is nonsense. A man does a man's work, honorable work with
his two hands, and makes his own money, much or little. The most
independent men in the world, Mr. Conniston, are men like Brayley and
Toothy and Rawhide Jones and the rest. Are you not as good a man as
these, as independent, as free to do as you like, as they are?"

"Am I as good a man!" He laughed shortly. "Conceit, no doubt, Miss
Crawford, but none the less I really do fancy that a Conniston is as
good as the sort of men I have been herding with here of late!"

She seemed not to notice his sarcasm, although his tones rang with it.

"Your going to work for father--I think it was brave of you. If it
makes any difference at all it will be because you make it do so. I
should be glad to have you ride with me as a companion if you wish."

She pricked her horse with her spur and rode on. And Conniston, after
a brief moment of hesitation in which he began to see that he had been
acting rather foolishly, galloped up to her side.

"I am afraid I have been boorish, Miss Crawford. You must forgive me."

"In three weeks you have learned a great deal, but there is still a
great deal which you do not seem to have assimilated."

"I have learned--" There was a question in his unfinished sentence.

"You have learned to ride as a man must who is to do his day's work of
twelve, maybe fifteen, hours in the saddle. Surely that is something.
You have learned to rope a steer on the dead run. You have learned to
rope your own horse, to throw him while you saddle him, and to ride
him when he gets up. You have learned to work."

He stared at her in surprise.

"How do you know what I have been doing?"

She laughed, a happy gurgle of a laugh which made a man want to laugh
with her without knowing the cause of her merriment.

"Lone