I'm going to drive Mr. Street over to the Tighe place in the buggy,"
she announced at breakfast.

Her brothers exchanged glances.

"Think you'd better go so far with your bad ankle, honey?" Hal
Rutherford, senior, asked.

"It doesn't make any difference, dad, so long as I don't put my weight
on it."

She had her way, as she usually did. One of the boys hitched up and
brought the team to the front of the house. Beaudry took the seat
beside Beulah.

The girl gathered up the reins, nodded good-bye to her father, and
drove off.

It was such a day as comes not more than a dozen times a season even in
New Mexico. The pure light from the blue sky and the pine-combed air
from the hills were like wine to their young blood. Once when the road
climbed a hilltop the long saw-toothed range lifted before them, but
mostly they could not see beyond the bastioned ramparts that hemmed in
the park or the nearer wooded gulches that ran down from them.

Beulah had brought her camera. They took pictures of each other. They
gathered wild flowers. They talked as eagerly as children. Somehow
the bars were down between them. The girl had lost the manner of
sullen resentment that had impressed him yesterday. She was gay and
happy and vivid. Wild roses bloomed in her cheeks. For this young man
belonged to the great world outside in which she was so interested.
Other topics than horses and cattle and drinking-bouts were the themes
of his talk. He had been to theaters and read books and visited large
cities. His coming had enriched life for her.

The trail took them past a grove of young aspens which blocked the
mouth of a small canon by the thickness of the growth.

"Do you see any way in?" Beulah asked her companion.

"No. The trees are like a wall. There is not an open foot by which
one could enter."

"Isn't there?" She laughed. "There's a way in just the same. You see
that big rock over to the left. A trail drops down into the aspens
back of it. A man lives in the gulch, an ex-convict. His name is Dan
Meldrum."

"I expect he isn't troubled much with visitors."'

"No. He lives alone. I don't like him. I wish he would move away.
He doesn't do the park any good."

A man was sitting on the porch of the Tighe place as they drove up.
Beside him lay a pair of crutches.

"That is Jess," the girl told Beaudry. "Don't mind if he is gruff or
bad-tempered. He is soured."

But evidently this was not the morning