tion, Vickers did not
get drunk in town. Through him Ruth learned much about the Flying W. He
gave her the fruit of his experience, and he had been with the Flying W
as range boss for nearly five years.

Vickers was forty. His hair was gray at the temples; he was slightly
stoop-shouldered from years in the saddle, and his legs were bowed from
the same cause. He was the driving force of the Flying W. Ruth's uncle
had written her to that effect the year before during his illness,
stating that without Vickers' help he would be compelled to sell the
ranch. The truth of this statement dawned upon Ruth very soon after her
acquaintance with Vickers. He was argus-eyed, omnipresent. It seemed that
he never slept. Mornings when she would arise with the dawn she would
find Vickers gone to visit some distant part of the range. She was seldom
awake at night when he returned.

He had said little to her regarding the men. "They 'tend to business,"
was his invariable response when she sought to question him. "It's a
pretty wild life," he told her when one day about two weeks after her
coming she had pressed him; "an' the boys just can't help kickin' over
the traces once in a while."

"Chavis and Pickett good men?" she asked.

"You saw anything to show you they ain't?" he said, with a queer look at
her.

"Why, no," she returned. But her cheeks reddened.

He looked at her with a peculiar squint. "Seems like Masten runnin' with
them shows that they ain't nothin' wrong with them," he said.

She had no reply to make to this, but she was vaguely disturbed over the
expression in Vickers' eyes; that look seemed to indicate that her own
first impression of the two men, and Uncle Jepson's later condemnation of
them, might be correct. However, they did not bother her, and she felt
certain that Masten could care for himself.

With Masten absent with Chavis and Pickett nearly every day, Ruth had
much time to herself. The river attracted her, and she rode to it many
times, on a slant-eyed pony that Vickers had selected for her, and which
had been gentled by a young cowpuncher brought in from an outlying camp
solely for that purpose by the range boss. The young puncher had been
reluctant to come, and he was equally reluctant to go.

"This here cayuse," he said to Vickers, when the latter instructed him to
return to his outfit, saying that Miss Ruth thought she could now ride
the pony without trouble, "is got a heap of devilment in him, yet-