ow the joys of getting up at half-past three in
the morning and going down at ten to eat off a fat mutton--

Bowers's rhapsody ended abruptly. He drew a hand across his eyes to
clear his vision. Down below, where he was wont to look for the white
top of the wagon, there was nothing but scattered wreckage! He heard the
sound now that had awakened him--the detonation of a charge of
dynamite! There was no need to go closer to learn the rest of the story.

Bowers's face twisted in a queer grimace. He cried brokenly in a grief
that can be understood fully only by the lonely:

"Pore little Mary! Pore little feller! Pore little innercent sheep that
never done no harm to nobody!"

CHAPTER XX

THE FORK OF THE ROAD

It would have looked, to any casual passerby, a pleasant family group
that occupied the front porch at the Scissor Ranch house one breezy
morning.

There was Mrs. Rathburn in a wide-brimmed hat, plying her embroidery
needle and looking, from afar, the picture of contentment. Equally
serene, to all outward appearances, was her daughter, with her head
swathed in veiling against the complexion-destroying wind as she rocked
to and fro while bringing her already perfect nails to the highest
degree of polish with a chamois-skin buffer. Hugh Disston sat on the top
step cleaning and oiling his shotgun with the loving care of the man who
is fond of firearms.

But if the Casual Passerby had ridden closer he might have observed that
Mrs. Rathburn was thrusting her needle back and forth through the taut
linen inside the embroidery hoop with a vigor which amounted to
viciousness; that Miss Rathburn drew the buffer so briskly across her
nails that the encircling flesh was all but blistered with the friction;
and that Disston as he oiled and rubbed let his gaze wander frequently
to the distant mountains and rest there wistfully.

Furthermore, the Casual Passerby--a blood relative of the Innocent
Bystander--would have been apt to notice that this act of Disston's
seemed automatically to accelerate the movements of the embroidery
needle and the chamois buffer, and speed up the rocking chairs.

Propinquity was not doing all that Mrs. Rathburn had anticipated. There
were moments like the present when, with real pleasure, she could have
run her needle to the hilt, as it were, in any convenient portion of
Disston's anatomy. She seethed with resentment, and took it out upon the
climate, the inhabitants, the customs of t