e recital and she cooed
assuringly to the kid, which nestled contentedly in her arms. But
something in her eyes and about her lips as he threw the wolf pelts at
her feet caused the man to look at her curiously. He had seen that
expression once before on the face of the wife of the dead sheepman when
some one had told her of the finding of a C Bar rider with a load of
buckshot through his heart some weeks after the assassination of her
husband. There had been no over-officious zeal displayed by the
authorities in their attempts to fix the responsibility of the man's
death, despite the fact that the sheepman's son possessed one of the
only three shotguns in the county, the deceased being reputedly a "bad
man" and notoriously the creature of Matlock. He it was who had assisted
in the fleecing of poor Braun, and the general consensus of opinion was
that "he only got what was coming to him!" The code of the range is as
drastic as it is simple.

"It's up to you now to mother this goat, Miss Grace," he said
whimsically; "I'll send a man in to Tin Cup to-morrow for a gunnysackful
of any pap-maker you nominate. We've got to assume the responsibility of
him, his mother having come to grief on your demesne. When you are ready
to christen him I'll get Red to stand godfather for him--that is, if you
have no other preferred sponsor in mind."

The girl looked up quickly; his tone seemed a bit patronizing and to her
mind altogether too familiar. It was an opportune time to inaugurate a
new order of things which all day she had been formulating.

"I shall name him now," she said, icily. "He shall be known as Buffo and
you are his sponsor."

"Buffo--a buffoon!" He laughed a little constrainedly. "Well, I think
the name is appropriate. He is a fool and so was his mother before him.
Otherwise they'd have never ventured in where naught but angels have any
license to tread."

She bit her lip in chagrin as he lifted his sombrero and rode
nonchalantly away. The intended rebuke had recoiled upon her and she was
furious at her impotence. Retreating to the kitchen, she somewhat curtly
ordered the cook--old Abigail Williams, sister to the postmaster, who in
order to preserve the proprieties had been engaged in that capacity--to
prepare some nourishment for her charge.

"We've got to feed the thing," she snapped in a tone strangely variant
from her endearing coo of a few minutes before.

Abbie nodded briskly: "I'll fix up a rag on a bottle