s a portly old bachelor with a scrubbing brush moustache should
do while seeking rejuvenation and awaiting a decree. He was always
upon the verge of entering some local project which he never entered.
He made more friends in the six months of his stay--he left in
June,--than any other man in El Toyon had made in a year.

He dined with the preacher and talked infant psychology with the
teacher; he bet Charlie Granger ten dollars on a dog-fight over which
he waxed red faced and enthusiastic; he got himself catalogued by the
saloon loungers as a hot sport; he evinced a warm interest in the
country races to be run in the Spring. In that connection he learned
that Granger held stakes amounting to ten thousand dollars on a single
race that would never be run; he was informed that the money was
already as good as Sledge Hume's. He became interested in Hume and in
Red Reckless; he even went to the length of travelling into the Dry
Lands to get a squint at Endymion, and then sought out Big Bill and
studied Little Saxon's good points. Everything in the world seemed to
interest Edward Kinsell.

The winter slipped by and the herds went back to the mountain ranges.
The Lelands were again at the Echo Creek. Time and a natural strong
affection had cooled the heat of passion in father and daughter. Love
and consanguinity narrowed the breach which lay between them, although
the rupture, if it ever healed completely, would leave its scar. Each
nature came to make certain allowances for the other; their
intercourse, though not intimate, was amicable. Neither made any
reference before the other to Wayne Shandon. And, as naturally as this
condition arose, Wanda and her mother drew closer together.

Upon the Bar L-M Big Bill was competent, hard working foreman. He
still hoped for the impossible, he still obeyed orders and sought
tirelessly to make Little Saxon all that Shandon could have done.
Willie Dart, growing as time wore on hollow eyed from his nocturnal
vigils, slept in a hay loft with a shot gun perilously near his eager
right hand.

Shandon was yet in the mountains, his headquarters Wanda's cave. It
seemed at times to his impatient desires that Brisbane was doing
nothing; that just the evidence he himself had told the lawyer that
night in White Rock should have led long before now to the arrest of
Sledge Hume. But he refused to brood over it, telling himself doggedly
that if Brisbane were doing nothing there was noth