ines. He set men to riding by
night and day a patrol of his long lines of wire, rifles under their
thighs, with orders to shoot anybody found cutting the fences in
accordance with the many threats to serve them so. Contentions and feuds
began, and battles and bloody encounters, which did not cease through
many a turbulent year. Philbrook lived in the saddle, for he was a man
of high courage and unbending determination, leaving his wife and child
in the suspense and solitude of their grand home in which they found no
pleasure.

The trees and shrubs which Philbrook had planted with such care and
attended with such hope, withered on the bleak plateau and died, in
spite of the water from the river; the delicate grass with which he
sought to beautify and clothe the harsh gray soil sickened and pined
away; the shrubs made a short battle against the bleakness of winter,
putting out pale, strange flowers like the wan smile of a woman who
stands on the threshold of death, then failed away, and died. Mrs.
Philbrook broke under the long strain of never-ending battles, and died
the spring that her daughter came eighteen years of age.

This girl had grown up in the saddle, a true daughter of her fighting
sire. Time and again she had led a patrol of two fence-riders along one
side of that sixty square miles of ranch while her father guarded the
other. She could handle firearms with speed and accuracy equal to any
man on the range, where she had been bearing a man's burden since her
early girlhood.

All this information pertaining to the history of Milton Philbrook and
his adventures in the Bad Lands, Orson Wood, the one-armed landlord at
the hotel in Glendora told Lambert on the evening of the travelers'
arrival there. The story had come as the result of questions concerning
the great white house on the mesa, the two men sitting on the porch in
plain view of it, Taterleg entertaining the daughter of the hotel
across the show case in the office.

Lambert found the story more interesting than anything he ever had
imagined of the Bad Lands. Here was romance looking down on him from the
lonely walls of that white house, and heroism of a finer kind than these
people appreciated, he was sure.

"Is the girl still here?" he inquired.

"Yes, she's back now. She's been away to school in Boston for three or
four years, comin' back in summer for a little while."

"When did she come back?"

Lambert felt that his voice was thick as he in