" retorted Ellen.

"I heah he's sweet on y'u. How aboot that?"

Ellen smarted under the blaze of blood that swept to neck and cheek and
temple. But it was only memory which fired this shame. What her
father and his crowd might think were matters of supreme indifference.
Yet she met his suspicious gaze with truthful blazing eyes.

"I heah talk from Bruce an' Lorenzo," went on her father. "An' Daggs
heah--"

"Daggs nothin'!" interrupted that worthy. "Don't fetch me in. I said
nothin' an' I think nothin'."

"Yes, Jean Isbel was sweet on me, dad ... but he will never be again,"
returned Ellen, in low tones. With that she pulled her saddle off
Spades and, throwing it over her shoulder, she walked off to her cabin.

Hardly had she gotten indoors when her father entered.

"Ellen, I didn't know that horse belonged to Isbel," he began, in the
swift, hoarse, persuasive voice so familiar to Ellen. "I swear I
didn't. I bought him--traded with Slater for him.... Honest to God, I
never had any idea he was stolen! ... Why, when y'u said 'that horse
y'u stole,' I felt as if y'u'd knifed me...."

Ellen sat at the table and listened while her father paced to and fro
and, by his restless action and passionate speech, worked himself into
a frenzy. He talked incessantly, as if her silence was condemnatory
and as if eloquence alone could convince her of his honesty. It seemed
that Ellen saw and heard with keener faculties than ever before. He had
a terrible thirst for her respect. Not so much for her love, she
divined, but that she would not see how he had fallen!

She pitied him with all her heart. She was all he had, as he was all
the world to her. And so, as she gave ear to his long, illogical
rigmarole of argument and defense, she slowly found that her pity and
her love were making vital decisions for her. As of old, in poignant
moments, her father lapsed at last into a denunciation of the Isbels
and what they had brought him to. His sufferings were real, at least,
in Ellen's presence. She was the only link that bound him to long-past
happier times. She was her mother over again--the woman who had
betrayed another man for him and gone with him to her ruin and death.

"Dad, don't go on so," said Ellen, breaking in upon her father's rant.
"I will be true to y'u--as my mother was.... I am a Jorth. Your place
is my place--your fight is my fight.... Never speak of the past to me
again. If God spares us through t