like a long, low warehouse. She knew the
straightest, shortest trail to the corrals, you may be sure of that.
She took that trail.

Pard was standing in a far corner under a shed, switching his tail
methodically at the October crop of flies. His head lay over the neck
of a scrawny little buckskin, for which he had formed a sudden and
violent attachment, and his eyes were half closed while he drowsed in
lazy content. Pard was not worrying about anything. He looked so
luxuriously happy that Jean had not the heart to disturb him, even with
her comfort-seeking caresses. She leaned her elbows on the corral gate
and watched him awhile. She asked a bashful, gum-chewing youth if he
could tell her where to find Lite Avery. But the youth seemed never to
have heard of Lite Avery, and Jean was too miserable to explain and
describe Lite, and insist upon seeing him. She walked over to the
nearest car-line and caught the next street car for the city. Part of
her chief's orders at least she would obey. She would go down to the
Victoria and see "Jean, of the Lazy A," but she was not going because
of any impulse of vanity, or to soothe her soul with the applause of
strangers. She wanted to see the ranch again. She wanted to see the
dear, familiar line of the old bluff that framed the coulee, and ride
again with Lite through those wild places they had chosen for the
pictures. She wanted to lose herself for a little while among the
hills that were home.

CHAPTER XX

CHANCE TAKES A HAND

A huge pipe organ was filling the theater with a vast undertone that
was like the whispering surge of a great wind. Jean went into the soft
twilight and sat down, feeling that she had shut herself away from the
harsh, horrible world that held so much of suffering. She sighed and
leaned her head back against the curtained enclosure of the loges, and
closed her eyes and listened to the big, sweeping harmonies that were
yet so subdued.

Down next the river, in a sheltered little coulee, there was a group of
great bull pines. Sometimes she had gone there and leaned against a
tree trunk, and had shut her eyes and listened to the vast symphony
which the wind and the water played together. She forgot that she had
come to see a picture which she had helped to create. She held her
eyes shut and listened; and that horror of high walls and iron bars
that had haunted her for days, and the aged, broken man who was her
father, dimmed and faded