me and commend me for such heroic
resistance!"

She jerked her bridle from his grasp and rode furiously on to the house,
and had dismounted and escaped to her room before he could overtake her.

CHAPTER IX

Pen found the ranch-house quite deserted the next morning. Kurt had gone
to Wolf Creek to purchase cattle and would not return until night. A
little scrawled note from Francis apprised her of the fact that Mrs.
Merlin was taking himself, Billy and Betty to spend the day at her own
home.

"A whole day alone for the first time in ages!" she thought exultingly.
"It is surely Pen Lamont's day. What shall I do to celebrate? Stop the
clock and play with the matches? I must do something stupendous. I know. I
will go into town and shop. I will go in style, too."

She took Kingdon's racing car out of the garage, and was soon speeding
down the hills with the little thrill of ecstasy that comes from leaving a
beaten track.

In town she left the car in front of the hotel and went down the Main
street, looking in dismay at the windows loaded with assorted and
heterogeneous lots of feminine apparel. At last she came to a little shop
with but three garments on display, all of them quite smart in style.

"You must be a 'lost, strayed or stolen,'" she apostrophized in delight.

She went within and purchased two gowns with all the many and necessary
accessories thereto.

"Lucky, Kind Kurt and Bender didn't search me that day," she thought. "I
never saw a sheriff or a near-sheriff so slack. If they'd been in my
business, they'd have known that you can't always tell what's in the
pocket of a ragged frock."

She visited in turn a shoe store, a soda water fountain and a beauty shop.
Then it was the town time for dining, and she returned to the hotel.

"I shouldn't have exhausted the resources of the town so soon," she
thought ruefully, as she stood in the office after registering. "I don't
know what I will do this afternoon unless I sit in a red plush chair in
the Ladies' Parlor and gaze out through the meshes of a coarse lace
curtain at the passers-by. I might call on Bender and see if he'd remember
me. Bet his wife would. Maybe something interesting will come along,
though."

Something did. It came in the shape of a lean, brown-faced young man.

"Larry, Larry!" she cried. "It's a homecoming to see you. I hadn't any
idea what part of the world you were in. What are you doing here?"

"The Thief!" he exclaimed, hi