ait a minute before you sell to that old skinflint!" Bud shouted
exuberantly, dismounting with a rush. The rush, I may say, carried him
to the little old lady in the slat sunbonnet, and to that other little
lady who was staring at him with wide, bright yes. Bud's arms went
around his mother. Perhaps by accident he gathered in Marian also--they
were standing very close, and his arms were very long--and he was slow
to discover his mistake.

"I'll give you two hundred for Boise, and I'll throw in one brother, and
one long-legged, good-for-nothing cowpuncher--"

"Meaning yourself, Buddy?" came teasingly from he slat sunbonnet, whose
occupant had not been told just everything. "I'll be surprised if she'll
have you, with that dirty face and no shave for a week and more. But
if she does, you're luckier than you deserve, for riding up on us like
this! We've heard all about you, Buddy--though you were wise to send
this lassie to gild your faults and make a hero of you!"

Now, you want to know how Marian managed to live through that. I will
say that she discovered how tenaciously a young man's arms may cling
when he thinks he is embracing merely his mother; but she freed herself
and ran to Eddie, fairly pulled him off his horse, and talked very
fast and incoherently to him and Jerry, asking question after question
without waiting for a reply to any of them. All this, I suppose, in the
hope that they would not hear, or, hearing, would not understand what
that terrible, wonderful little woman was saying so innocently.

But you cannot faze youth. Eddie had important news for Sis, and he felt
that now was the time to tell it before Marian blushed any redder, so
he pulled her face up to his, put his lips so close to her ear that his
breath tickled, and whispered--without any preface whatever that she
could marry Bud any time now, because she was a widow.

"Here! Somebody--Bud--quick! Sis has fainted! Doggone it, I only told
her Lew's dead and she can marry you--shucks! I thought she'd be glad!"

Down on the Staked Plains, on an evening much like the evening when Bud
came home with his "stake" and his hopes and two black sheep who were
becoming white as most of us, a camp-fire began to crackle and wave
smoke ribbons this way and that before it burned steadily under the
supper pots of a certain hungry, happy group which you know.

"It's somewhere about here that I got lost from camp when I was a kid,"
Bud observed, tilting back hi