quired, disturbed by the
eager beating of his heart. Who knows? and perhaps, and all the rest of
it came galloping to him with a roar of blood in his ears like the sound
of a thousand hoofs. The landlord called over his shoulder to his
daughter:

"Alta, when did Vesta Philbrook come back?"

"Four or five weeks ago," said Alta, with the sound of chewing gum.

"Four or five weeks ago," the landlord repeated, as though Alta spoke a
foreign tongue and must be translated.

"I see," said Lambert, vaguely, shaking to the tips of his fingers with
a kind of buck ague that he never had suffered from before. He was
afraid the landlord would notice it, and slewed his chair, getting out
his tobacco to cover the fool spell.

For that was she, Vesta Philbrook was she, and she was Vesta Philbrook.
He knew it as well as he knew that he could count ten. Something had led
him there that day; the force that was shaping the course of their two
lives to cross again had held him back when he had considered selling
his horse and going West a long distance on the train. He grew calmer
when he had his cigarette alight. The landlord was talking again.

"Funny thing about Vesta comin' home, too," he said, and stopped a
little, as if to consider the humor of it. Lambert looked at him with a
sudden wrench of the neck.

"Which?"

"Philbrook's luck held out, it looked like, till she got through her
education. All through the fights he had and the scrapes he run into
the last ten years he never got a scratch. Bullets used to hum around
that man like bees, and he'd ride through 'em like they _was_ bees, but
none of 'em ever notched him. Curious, wasn't it?"

"Did somebody get him at last?"

"No, he took typhoid fever. He took down about a week or ten days after
Vesta got home. He died about a couple of week ago. Vesta had him laid
beside her mother up there on the hill. He said they'd never run him out
of this country, livin' or dead."

Lambert swallowed a dry lump.

"Is she running the ranch?"

"Like an old soldier, sir. I tell you, I've got a whole lot of
admiration for that girl."

"She must have her hands full."

"Night and day. She's short on fence-riders, and I guess if you boys are
lookin' for a job you can land up there with Vesta, all right."

Taterleg and the girl came out and sat on the green rustic bench at the
farther end of the porch. It complained under them; there was talk and
low giggling.

"We didn't expect to st