or a rider.
He did not mention him at all. He had learned in bitterness how idle
gossip may eat away the efficiency of a whole company.

For that reason, and also because his mind was busy with his plans and
the best means of carrying them out, the two rode almost in silence to
the hill that shut the Flying U coulee away from the world. Luck gave a
long sigh and muttered "Great!" when the whole coulee lay spread before
them. Then his quick glances took in various details of the ranch and he
sighed again, from a different emotion.

"It must have been a great place twenty years ago," he amended his first
unqualified enthusiasm.

"Why twenty years ago?" The Native Son gave him a quick,
half-resentful glance.

"Twenty years ago there wasn't so much barb-wire trimming," Luck
explained from the viewpoint of the trained producer of Western pictures.
"You couldn't place a camera anywhere now for a long shot across the
coulee without bringing a fence into the scene. And the log stables are
too old, and the new ones too new." He pulled up and stared long at the
sweep of hills beyond, and the wide spread of the meadow and the big
field farther up stream, and at the lazy meandering of Flying U creek
with its willow fringe just turning yellow with the first touch of
autumn. He looked at the buildings sprawled out below him.

"When that log house was headquarters for the ranch, and the round-pole
corrals were the only fences on the place," he said; "when those old
sheds held the saddle horses on cold nights, and the wagons were out from
green grass to snowfall, and the boys laid around all winter, just
reportin' regular at grub-pile and catching up on sleep they'd lost in
the summer--Lor-dee, what a place it must have been!"

There was something in his tone that brought the Native Son for an
instant face to face with the Flying U in the old days when all the range
was free. So, with faces sober, because the old days were gone and would
never any more return, they rode down the grade and up to the new stable
that was a monument to the dead past, even though it might also be a
sign-post pointing to present prosperity. And in this wise came Luck
Lindsay to the Flying U and was made welcome.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE LITTLE DOCTOR PROTESTS

The Little Doctor stepped out upon the porch with the faint tracing of a
frown upon her smooth forehead, and with that slight tightening of the
lips which to her family meant determination