id,
and it seemed to Lorraine after three or four days of it that he had
summed up the life of a cattleman's daughter in a masterly manner which
ought to be recorded among Famous Sayings like "War is hell" and "Don't
give up the ship."

On this particular morning Lorraine's spirits were at their lowest ebb.
If it were not for the new stepfather, she would return to the Casa
Grande, she told herself disgustedly. And if it were not for the belief
among all her acquaintances that she was queening it over the
cattle-king's vast domain, she would return and find work again in
motion pictures. But she could not bring herself to the point of facing
the curiosity and the petty gossip of the studios. She would be expected
to explain satisfactorily why she had left the real West for the mimic
West of Hollywood. She did not acknowledge to herself that she also
could not face the admission of failure to carry out what she had begun.

She had told her dad that she wanted to fight with him, even though
"fighting" in this case meant washing the coarse clothing of her father
and Frank, scrubbing the rough, warped boards of the cabin floor, and
frying ranch-cured bacon for every meal, and in making butter to sell,
and counting the eggs every night and being careful to use only the
cracked ones for cooking.

She hated every detail of this crude housekeeping, from the chipped
enamel dishpan to the broom that was all one-sided, and the pillow slips
which were nothing more nor less than sugar sacks. She hated it even
more than she had hated the Casa Grande and her mother's frowsy
mentality. But because she could see that she made life a little more
comfortable for her dad, because she felt that he needed her, she would
stay and assure herself over and over that she was staying merely
because she was too proud to go back to the old life and own the West a
failure.

She was sweeping the doorstep with the one-sided broom when Brit drove
out through the gate and up the trail which she knew led eventually to
Sugar Spring. The horses, sleek in their new hair and skittish with the
change from hay to new grass, danced over the rough ground so that the
running gear of the wagon, with its looped log-chain, which would later
do duty as a brake on the long grade down from timber line on the side
of Spirit Canyon, rattled and banged over the rocks with a clatter that
could be heard for half a mile. Lorraine looked after her father
enviously. If she