ut a word started up the trail to The Forks.

"Seems to have gone with as little ceremony as he came," Wilson remarked
to his daughter. "Now, let us get along with the calves."...

Y.D. rode the trail to The Forks in bitterness of spirit. He had sallied
forth that morning strong and daring to administer summary punishment;
he was retracing his steps thrashed, humiliated, branded for life by a
red iron thrust in his face by a slip of a girl. He exhausted his by
no means limited vocabulary of epithets, but even his torrents of abuse
brought no solace to him. The hot sun beat down on his wounded face
and hurt terribly, but he almost forgot that pain in the agony of his
humiliation. He had been thrashed by an old man, with a wisp of a girl
sitting on a post and acting as referee. He turned in his saddle and
through the empty valley shouted an insulting name at her.

Then Y.D. slowly began to feel his face burn with a fire not of the
branding-iron nor of the afternoon sun. He knew that his word was a lie.
He knew that he would not have dared use it in her father's hearing. He
knew that he was a coward. No man had ever called Y.D. a coward; no
man had ever known him for a coward; he had never known himself as
such--until to-day. With all his roughness Y.D. had a sense of honor
as keen as any razor blade. If he allowed himself wide latitude in some
matters it was because he had lived his life in an atmosphere where the
wide latitude was the thing. The prairie had been his bed, the sky his
roof, himself his own policeman, judge, and executioner since boyhood.
When responsibility is so centralized wide latitudes must be allowed.
But the uttermost borders of that latitude were fixed with iron
rigidity, and when he had thrown a vile epithet at a decent woman he
knew he had broken the law of honor. He was a cur--a cur who should be
shot in his tracks for the cur he was.

Y.D. did hard thinking all the way to The Forks. Again and again the
figure of the girl flashed before him; he would close his eyes and jerk
his head back to avoid the burning iron. Then he saw her on the post,
sitting, with apparent impartiality, on guard over the fight. Yes,
she had been impartial, in a way. Y.D. was willing to admit that much,
although he surmised that she knew more about her father's prowess with
his fists than he had known. She had had no doubt about the outcome.

"Well, she's good backing for her old man, anyway," he admitted, with
return