avy timber, with porches in front and rear, and wide cornices, all
painted white and set on a solid foundation of stone. It looked spacious
and comfortable. The other buildings--stables, bunkhouse, messhouse,
blacksmith shop, and several others--did not discredit the ranchhouse.
They all were in good repair. She had already noted that the fences were
well kept; she had seen chickens and pigs, flowers and a small garden;
and behind the stable, in an enclosure of barbed wire, she had observed
some cows--milkers, she was certain.

The ranchhouse was well sheltered by timber. The great cottonwood grove
that she had seen from the plains was close to the house on the south; it
extended east and west for perhaps half a mile, and a grove of firs rose
to the north, back of the pasture fence. The general character of the
land surrounding the house was a sort of rolling level. The foothills
belonging to the mountains that she had seen while approaching the
ranchhouse were behind the cottonwood grove. She had seen, too, that the
river they had crossed at the ford which Wes Vickers had called
"Calamity" was not more than a mile from the house, and therefore she
concluded that it doubled widely. Later, she learned from Vickers that
her conclusion was correct, and that the river was called "Rabbit Ear."
Why it was called that she was never able to discover.

When the buckboard came to a halt, two men who had been seated in the
doorway of one of the buildings--she discovered, later, that it was the
bunkhouse--got up, lazily, and approached the buckboard. Ruth felt a
pulse of trepidation as they sauntered close to the wagon. Vickers had
told her nothing directly concerning the character of the men at the
ranch, but during their conversation at Red Rock that morning he had
mentioned that the "boys are a good lot, taken together, but they's some
that don't measure up." And she wondered whether these two came under
that final vague, though significant classification.

Their appearance was against them. The one in advance, a man of medium
height, looked positively villainous with his long, drooping black
mustache and heavy-thatched eyebrows. He eyed the occupants of the
buckboard with an insolent half-smile, which the girl thought he
tried--in vain--to make welcoming.

The other was a man of about thirty; tall, slender, lithe, swarthy, with
thin, expressive lips that were twisted upward at one corner in an
insincere smirk. This taller ma