him, and that he was waiting and watching for an
opportunity for revenge.

Then one day she met him face to face in Julia, and stepped to him to
tell him about the boulder in the road. His glance was like a knife
thrust as he turned on his heel and stalked away before she could
speak. After that, of course, she made no further effort to enlighten
him.

As the weeks passed it developed that Orr Tweet was not the slowest
salesman in California, where salesmen--especially land
salesmen--achieve their greatest triumphs. Not only did he sell lots
and building sites in Ragtown, but he disposed of the surrounding
acreage to would-be ranchers and speculators, and had been able with
ease, he informed his old friends, to meet his second payment on the
ranch. He urged Jo to invest her earnings in the company, and after
consideration she resolved to take a chance with him; for here and
there, where wells had been sunk and pumping apparatus installed, the
once barren land was turning green and showing evidences of rich and
productive soil.

So things stood, or refused to stand, in Ragtown and the vicinity when
Drummond drove in one day with no less a passenger than a pretty girl,
all pink and white, named Lucy Dalles. Hiram Hooker came face to face
with her in Ragtown's boisterous business street an hour after her
arrival, for Jo's freight outfit was at rest there for the night.

Lucy was as pretty in her petite, doll-like way as when she had so
fascinated him in the city, but now he could not help comparing her
hothouse beauty with the brown-skinned, outdoor desirability of
Jerkline Jo. Jo could have picked up this frail, silk-garbed creature
and thrown her overhead; yet in pure womanliness and tenderness Lucy
was not her equal. Jerkline Jo was a queen--a ruler--a fearless woman
with a purpose in life, big of body and soul and brain. Lucy Dalles
was merely a pretty girl, with an ambition for money and life's
frivolous pleasures. Hiram understood this now.

She greeted him glowingly, and called him by his first name.

"I told you I was coming," she cried, giggling. "And isn't this rich?
If only I were writing scenarios now!"

"Aren't you?" asked Hiram.

"No, I gave it up. They got too exacting for me, and began buying the
picture rights of books and magazine stories by established authors in
preference to original scripts for the screen. I was a piker,
anyway--nothing in me, I guess. So I threw up the sponge.