a dozen or so out of the lot that sized up a shade
better than the rest. Looking back from where I sit it occurs to me
that it was a right colorless assortment, after all. I've heard that
men run mostly to form and at one time or another let it out to some
little lady that there's no other in the world. That's my own state
right about now. Are you always going to keep on disliking me?"

"I don't dislike you," she said. She was still convinced of his
father's trickery toward her own; but Cal Harris's quiet efficiency and
his devotion to Three Bar interests had convinced her, against her
will, that he had taken no part in it. "But if you brought me out here
to go into that I'm going back."

"I didn't," he denied. "But I drifted into it sort of by accident. No
matter what topic I happen to be conversing on I'm always thinking how
much I'd rather be telling you about that. Whenever I make some simple
little assertion about things in general, what I'm really thinking is
something like this, 'Billie, right this minute I'm loving you more
than I did two minutes back.' You might keep that in mind."

The girl did not answer but sat looking off across the jumbled
foothills, rock-studded and gray with sage. Some distance from them a
bare shale-slide extended for half a mile along a sidehill, barren and
devoid of all vegetation. Here and there, far off across the country,
vivid patches on the slopes indicated thickets of willows and birch
growing below spring seeps. A few scattered cedars sprouted from the
rocky ledges of the more broken country and a clump of gnarled,
wind-twisted cottonwoods marked a distant water hole. A whitish glare
was reflected from an alkali flat in the bottom of a shallow basin.
Twenty miles to the north the first rims of the hills rose out of the
low country and through the breaks in them she could see long sloping
valleys of lodgepole, the dark green relieved by the pale silvery sheen
of aspen clumps; dense spruce jungles of the more precipitous slopes
topped by rugged peaks covered with perpetual snow; certainly no soft
or homelike scene. One must be filled with a vast love of it--or die
of it--for without that love of the open life would be a deadly thing
to bear in a desert of sage.

"I've always loved it," she said. "Whenever I've been away there
always came a time when I was restless to get back. I've always felt
that it would kill me to leave with the idea that I'd never see th