t you, Duke, for me?"

"What in the world do you want them for, just for one day?"

"I can't explain that to you now, Duke, but I pledge you my honor, I
pledge you everything, that they'll be returned to you before night, not
a head missing, nothing wrong."

"Does your father know--does he----"

"It's for myself that I'm asking this of you, Duke; nobody else. It
means--it means--_everything_ to me."

"If they were my cattle, Grace, if they were my cattle," said he
aimlessly, amazed by the request, groping for the answer that lay behind
it. What could a girl want to borrow five hundred head of cattle for?
What in the world would she get out of holding them in her possession
one day and then turning them back into the pasture? There was something
back of it; she was the innocent emissary of a crafty hand that had a
trick to play.

"We could run them over here, just you and I, and nobody would know
anything about it," she tempted, the color back in her cheeks, her eyes
bright as in the pleasure of a request already granted.

"I don't like to refuse you even that, Grace."

"You'll do it, you'll do it, Duke?" Her hand was on his arm in beguiling
caress, her eyes were pleading into his.

"I'm afraid not, Grace."

Perhaps she felt a shading of coldness in his denial, for distrust and
suspicion were rising in his cautious mind. It did not seem to him a
thing that could be asked with any honest purpose, but for what
dishonest one he had no conjecture to fit.

"Are you going to turn me down on the first request I ever made of you,
Duke?" She watched him keenly as she spoke, making her eyes small, an
inflection of sorrowful injury in her tone.

"If there's anything of my own you want, if there's anything you can
name for me to do, personally, all you've got to do is hint at it
once."

"It's easy to say that when there's nothing else I want!" she said,
snapping it at him as sharp as the crack of a little whip.

"If there _was_ anything----"

"There'll never be anything!"

She got up, flashing him an indignant look. He stood beside her,
despising the poverty of his condition which would not allow him to
deliver over to her, out of hand, the small matter of five hundred
beeves.

She went to her horse, mightily put out and impatient with him, as he
could see, threw the reins over her pommel, as if she intended to leave
him at once. She delayed mounting, suddenly putting out her hands in
supplication, tears sprin