lways of his
challenge to Roaring Russell. Slow to anger, Mormon, when his rage
mounted was slow of statement. What he said he meant. The insult to
Miranda Bailey while under his escort chafed him as a saddle chafes a
galled horse. It had to be wiped out at the earliest moment and,
singularly enough, the spinster was not particularly prominent in the
matter. It was not a personal question; the insult had been offered to
womanhood, and Mormon was ever its champion and its victim.

Sam, cut off from tobacco and melody, bunkered down with his back
against a frame timber and looked at the tall lean figure of Sandy
silhouetted against the stars, wondering why Sandy had stopped so
abruptly when the names of Westlake and Molly Casey had been coupled. It
wasn't like Sandy to move or halt without definite purpose, Sam
reasoned. "I suppose he figgers Molly too much of a kid," he told
himself. "If these claims pan out she'll be rich. Likewise, so will we."
His thoughts shifted to dreams of what he would do when they were
wealthy. Very far beyond the purchase of an elaborate saddle and outfit,
a horse or two he coveted, the finest harmonica to be bought, he did not
go. That Sandy might have felt a tinge of jealousy toward young Westlake
was furthest from his conjectures.

As for Sandy, he had lost his mental orientation. Something had
happened, something was happening within him and he could not tell the
process nor name it. He was as a man who goes out into the darkness amid
rooms and passages with which he considers himself familiar and
suddenly--there comes a door where should be space, or space where there
should be a window--and he is lost, his senses betray him, for the
moment he is completely fogged, all bearings lost, possessed with the
blankness that accompanies the flight of self-confidence.

He could see very plainly in mental vision the picture that Molly had
sent to the Three Star, now framed and given the place of honor on the
table of the ranch-house living-room. The picture of a girl in whose
eyes the fleeting look of womanhood, that Sandy had now and then seen
there and which had thrilled him so strangely, had become permanent.
That she was something so vital she could not be dismissed from the life
of the Three Star, from his own life, by sending her to school whence
she would return almost a stranger, by making her an heiress, Sandy
recognized. He had deliberately given her his hand to help her out of
the rut