the kids if they came back where he could have a
chance. He wrote this painstakingly to the lawyer and received no reply.
Later he learned from Minnie that she had freed herself from him, and
that she was keeping boarders and asking no odds of him.

To come at once to the end of Brit's matrimonial affairs, he heard from
the children once in a year, perhaps, after they were old enough to
write. He did not send them money, because he seemed never to have any
money to send, and because they did not ask for any. Dumbly he sensed,
as their handwriting and their spelling improved, that his children were
growing up. But when he thought of them they seemed remote, prattling
youngsters whom Minnie was forever worrying over and who seemed to have
been always under the heels of his horse, or under the wheels of his
wagon, or playing with the pitchfork, or wandering off into the sage
while he and their distracted mother searched for them. For a long
while--how many years Brit could not remember--they had been living in
Los Angeles. Prospering, too, Brit understood. The girl,
Lorraine--Minnie had wanted fancy names for the kids, and Brit
apologized whenever he spoke of them, which was seldom--Lorraine had
written that "Mamma has an apartment house." That had sounded
prosperous, even at the beginning. And as the years passed and their
address remained the same, Brit became fixed in the belief that the Casa
Grande was all that its name implied, and perhaps more. Minnie must be
getting rich. She had a picture of the place on the stationery which
Lorraine used when she wrote him. There were two palm trees in front,
with bay windows behind them, and pillars. Brit used to study these
magnificences and thank God that Minnie was doing so well. He never
could have given her a home like that. Brit sometimes added that he had
never been cut out for a married man, anyway.

Old-timers forgot that Brit had ever been married, and late comers never
heard of it. To all intents the owners of the Quirt outfit were old
bachelors who kept pretty much to themselves, went to town only when
they needed supplies, rode old, narrow-fork saddles and grinned
scornfully at "swell-forks" and "buckin'-rolls," and listened to all the
range gossip without adding so much as an opinion. They never talked
politics nor told which candidates received their two votes. They kept
the same two men season after season,--leathery old range hands with
eyes that saw whatever c