is youth up there, and what would this smart little automobile count
against a whole right hand? And this trunkful of clothes--what would it
weigh against a good-sized man? Still, still, though she might have taken
her pick of 'em all, Annabel had never married, and she had kept his
goats. Then he remembered Tisdale had said that she too had had a hard
fight, and the years must have changed her. And hadn't she herself told
him, in that letter he carried in his breast pocket, that if he cared to
come and see the goats, he would find his investment was turning out fine,
but he needn't expect she had kept her own good looks?

The little man smiled with returning confidence and, lifting his glance,
saw the cabin and the browsing flock cut off by the barbed-wire fence from
the road. Then as he brought the car to a stop, the collie flew barking
against the wicket, and a gaunt woman rose from a rock and stood shading
her eyes from the morning sun.

He sprang down and spoke to the dog, and instantly his tone quieted the
collie, but the woman came nearer to point at the sign. "You better read
that," she threatened.

His hand dropped from the wicket, and he stood staring at her across the
barbed wire. "I was looking for a lady," he said slowly, "but I guess
likely I've made a mistake."

She came another step and, again shading her eyes, stared back. A look
half eager, half wistful, trembled for a moment through the forbidding
tenseness of her face. "All the men I've seen in automobiles up here were
looking for land," she replied defiantly.

He nodded; his eyes did not move from her face, but they shone like two
chippings of blue glacier ice, and his voice when he spoke piped its
sharpest key. "So am I. I've got an option on a pocket somewheres in this
range, and the lady I'm inquiring for happened to homestead the quarter
below. It sort of overlaps, so's she put her improvements on the wrong
edge. Yes, ma'am, I've likely made a mistake, but, you see, I heard she
had a bunch o' goats."

There was a brief silence then. "Anyhow, you must o' come from that
surveyor," she said. "Maybe he was just a smooth talker, but he had a nice
face; laughing crinkles around his eyes and a way of looking at you, if
you'd done a mean thing, to make you feel like the scum of the earth. But
he happened to be acquainted with the man that made me a present of my
first billy and ewes, and you--favor him a little." She paused, then went
on unsteadil