was to be abundantly confirmed. Returning from her ride
the following afternoon, she saw that the youth must pass her on the
public highway. They were out on the flat, with no arboreal sanctuary
for the timid one. The lady looked forward with genial malice to a
meeting which, it appeared, he was now powerless to avoid. But the
youth, perceiving his plight, instantly had trouble with a saddle girth.
Turning well out of the road, he dismounted on the farther side of his
horse and busied himself with the mechanics of proper cinching. As Mrs.
Laithe rode by she saw only the top of a wide-brimmed gray hat above the
saddle.

The day following, when, in an orderly sequence of events, they should
have met at the ford, he turned with admirable promptness down the
stream, where no trail was, sharply scanning the thinned edge of a wood
in the perfect manner of one absorbed in a search for lost stock.
Clearly, his was a mind fertile, if not subtle, in resource.

Not until a day later did he come truly to face her, and then only by
the circumstance of his being penned by her within the high-walled
corral where Red Phinney broke green horses to ride, work or carry.
Returning this day earlier than was her wont, and finding no one at the
front of the house to take her pony, she had ridden back to the corrals.
Here she delivered the animal to Phinney, but not before the timid one
had been compelled to pass her. He did this, she thought, only after
swiftly calculating the height of the walls that pent him. And though
his hat was doffed as he hurtled by, his eyes were on the ground. Mrs.
Laithe, feeling thus at liberty to stare brutally at him, felt a
prodigious heightening of that tower of amazement he had been rearing
within her mind, for she saw him blush most furiously; beheld it under
the brown of his beardless face.

Yet there was more in the young face than this flaunted banner of
embarrassment; and scanning it intently, she resolved forthwith to know
him.

Late that day she was pleased to come upon Beulah Pierce alone in the
big living room of the ranch house. Smoking a last pipe before the call
to supper, Beulah relaxed on the "lounge" after a toilsome season of
ditch-making.

"Oh, him?" he answered, luxuriously extending legs that seemed much too
long for any reasonable need of man, and pulling at his ragged red
mustache. "Why, that's Ewing's kid."

"Ewing?" retorted Mrs. Laithe, provocatively, winningly.

"Ewing," aff