cksie. Puss
had charge of the house, and her mistress concerned herself more
with the setting of Jim's shoes than with the dust on the elk
heads over the fireplace in the dining-room. Her Medicine Bend
horseshoer stood in much greater awe of her than Puss did, because
if he ever left a mistake on Jim's heels Dicksie could, and would,
point it coldly out.

One March afternoon, coming home from Medicine Bend, she saw at some
distance before her a party of men on horseback. She was riding a
trail leading from the pass road that followed the hills, and the
party was coming up the bridge road from the lower ranch. Dicksie had
good eyes, and something unusual in the riding of the men was soon
apparent to her. Losing and regaining sight of them at different turns
in the trail, she made out, as she rode among the trees, that they
were cowboys of her own ranch, and riding, under evident excitement,
about a strange horseman. She recognized in the escort Stormy Gorman,
the ferocious foreman of the ranch, and Denison and Jim Baugh, two of
the most reckless of the men. These three carried rifles slung across
their pommels, and in front of them rode the stranger.

Fragments of the breakfast-table talk of the morning came back to
Dicksie's mind. The railroad graders were in the valley below the
ranch, and she had heard her cousin say a good deal on a point she
cared little about, as to where the railroad should cross the Stone
Ranch. Approaching the fork of the two roads toward which she and the
cowboys were riding, she checked her horse in the shade of a
cottonwood tree, and as the party rode up the draw she saw the
horseman under surveillance. It was George McCloud.

Unluckily, as she caught a glimpse of him she was conscious that he
was looking at her. She bent forward to hide a momentary confusion,
spoke briskly to her horse, and rode out of sight. At Marion's she had
carefully avoided him. Her precipitancy at their last meeting had
seemed, on reflection, unfortunate. She felt that she must have
appeared to him shockingly rude, and there was in her recalling of the
scene an unconfessed impression that she had been to blame. Often when
Marion spoke of him, which she did without the slightest reserve and
with no reference as to whether Dicksie liked it or not, it had been
in Dicksie's mind to bring up the subject of the disagreeable scene,
hoping that Marion would suggest a way for making some kind of
unembarrassing amends. But