easy as being a rotter.

"Are you a rawncher?"

"No! It takes money to be that."

"You're a foreman, or a cowboy, or something?"

"No,--I'm not anything yet," smiled Phil. "I'm just starting in. I've
lately finished my college training."

The irony in his voice was lost on DeRue Hannington who was too full
of his own troubles to worry about those of anyone else.

"Well, you see,--when the dad and I had that tiff, I just took him
on.

"I saw an advertisement of a rawnching chap in a London journal,
offering to take on an Englishman as an apprentice and teach him
everything about rawnching for three years for five hundred dollars a
year. I just cabled that fellow and got his answer to come right away.
And here I got three months ago."

All the time he was speaking, Hannington was eating ravenously but
with the ease and daintiness of one whose table manners were an
eternal part of him.

"The rawncher met me at the station with two horses. Not a blessed
wagon or a thing to carry my luggage did the bounder have. It is lying
at the station yet;--at least it was last time I called in there. The
fellow took my five hundred dollars, then took me twenty miles up over
these everlasting hills. A thousand miles in the bally wilderness!

"Of course, you know, Phil, I will admit I was deuced raw."

Phil laughed. DeRue Hannington's good nature asserted itself and he
laughed, too.

After a while, he went on.

"This rawnching Johnnie's name was Duff. You don't happen to know
him?"

Phil shook his head.

"Well,--he put me in the charge of Mrs. Duff, and she set me to paring
potatoes, washing the floors, scouring pots and pans, wringing clothes
and all that sort of rot; till, one day, I just said to Duff that I'd
come West to rawnch, not to skivvy.

"Of course, I'll admit, I didn't know an apple tree from a cauliflower,
but, damme, I was game to learn, Phil. Don't you think I did right to
jolly-well remonstrate?"

"You certainly did!"

Thus encouraged, DeRue Hannington continued:

"He then put me to digging, and digging, and digging, till the cows
came home, then to weeding, and weeding, and weeding, miles and miles
of rows and rows of beastly carrots and things until I can't look an
honest carrot in the face or a potato in the eye without feeling
faint.

"I really didn't seem to be learning anything, but I stuck it gamely
until three days ago, when Mr. and Mrs. Duff went off to visit a
neighbour five miles up