m when he sulked,
but she had never seen him look like that.

He called her to come back. He made threats of what he would do if she
refused to obey him. He shook his fist at her. He behaved like a man
temporarily robbed of his reason; his eyes, as he came up glaring at
her, were the eyes of a madman.

Jean felt a tremor of dread while she looked at him and listened to
him. He was almost within reach of her again when she wheeled and went
off up the trail at a run. She looked back often, half fearing that he
would get a horse and follow her, but he stood just where she had left
him, and he seemed to be still uttering threats and groundless
accusations as long as she was in sight.

CHAPTER XVI

FOR ONCE AT LEAST LITE HAD HIS WAY

Half a mile she galloped, and met Lite coming home. She glanced over
her shoulder before she pulled Pard down to a walk, and Lite's
greeting, as he turned and rode alongside her, was a question. He
wanted to know what was the matter with her. He listened with his old
manner of repression while she told him, and he made no comment
whatever until she had finished.

"You must have made him pretty sore," he said dispassionately. "I
don't think myself that you ought to stay over to the ranch alone. Why
don't you do as he says?"

"And go back to the Bar Nothing?" Jean shivered a little. "Nothing
could make me go back there! Lite, you don't understand. He acted like
a crazy man; and I hadn't said anything to stir him up like that. He
was--Lite, he scared me! I couldn't stay on the ranch with him. I
couldn't be in the same room with him."

"You can't go on staying at the Lazy A," Lite told her flatly.

"There's no other place where I'd stay."

"You could," Lite pointed out, "stay in town and go back and forth with
the rest of the bunch. It would be a lot better, any way you look at
it."

"It would be a lot worse. There's my book; I wouldn't have any chance
to write on that. And there's the expense. I'm saving every nickel I
possibly can, Lite, and you know what for. And there's the bunch--I
see enough of them during working hours. I'd go crazy if I had to live
with them. Lite, they've put me in playing leads! I'm to get a
hundred dollars a week! Just think of that! And Burns says that I'll
have to go back to Los Angeles with them when they go this fall,
because the contract I signed lasts for a year."

She sighed. "I rode over to tell you about it. It seemed