, she had scrubbed the
kitchen floor until the boards dried white as kitchen floors may be.
She had baked a loaf of gingerbread, that came from the oven with a
most delectable odor, and had wrapped it in a clean cloth to cool on
the kitchen table. Her dad and Lite Avery would show cause for the
baking of it when they sat down, fresh washed and ravenous, to their
supper that evening. I mention Jean and her scrubbed kitchen and the
gingerbread by way of proving how the Lazy A went unwarned and
unsuspecting to the very brink of its disaster.

Lite Avery, long and lean and silently content with life, had ridden
away with a package of sandwiches, after a full breakfast and a smile
from the slim girl who cooked it, upon the business of the day; which
happened to be a long ride with one of the Bar Nothing riders, down in
the breaks along the river. Jean's father, big Aleck Douglas, had
saddled and ridden away alone upon business of his own. And presently,
in mid-forenoon, Jean closed the kitchen door upon an immaculately
clean house filled with the warm, fragrant odor of her baking, and in
fresh shirt waist and her best riding-skirt and Stetson, went whistling
away down the path to the stable, and saddled Pard, the brown colt that
Lite had broken to the saddle for her that spring. In ten minutes or so
she went galloping down the coulee and out upon the trail to town,
which was fifteen miles away and held a chum of hers.

So Lazy A coulee was left at peace, with scratching hens busy with the
feeding of half-feathered chicks, and a rooster that crowed from the
corral fence seven times without stopping to take breath. In the big
corral a sorrel mare nosed her colt and nibbled abstractedly at the
pile of hay in one corner, while the colt wabbled aimlessly up and
sniffed curiously and then turned to inspect the rails that felt so
queer and hard when he rubbed his nose against them. The sun was warm,
and cloud-shadows drifted lazily across the coulee with the breeze that
blew from the west. You never would dream that this was the last
day,--the last few hours even,--when the Lazy A would be the untroubled
home of three persons of whose lives it formed so great a part.

At noon the hens were hovering their chickens in the shade of the mower
which Lite was overhauling during his spare time, getting it ready for
the hay that was growing apace out there in the broad mouth of the
coulee. The rooster was wallowing luxuriously in