"Sure."

"There ain't a muck hole in miles and miles around that you could fall into, and not come out of with a clean conscience an' a wholesome mind.

Kind of different to a city."

Gordon stirred. He turned and looked into Silas Mallinsbee's smiling eyes.

"It's--all yours?" he inquired.

"For miles an' miles around. I got nigh a hundred miles of grazing in these hills--and nobody else don't seem to want it. Makes you wonder."

Gordon laughed.

"Say, set a spade into the ground and find a marketable mineral and tell somebody. Then see."

Mallinsbee chewed an unlit cigar, and his chin beard twisted absurdly.

"That's it," he said slowly. "There's nothing to these hills as they are, except to a cattleman, I guess. Cattle don't suit the modern man.

Your profitable crop's a three years' waiting, and that don't mean a thing to folk nowadays, except a dead loss of time on the round-up of dollars. They don't figure that once you're good and going that three years' crop comes around once every year. So they miss a deal."

"Yes, they'd reckon it slow, I guess," Gordon agreed. "But," he went on with enthusiasm, "the life of it. The air." He took a deep breath of the sparkling mountain atmosphere. "It's champagne. The champagne of life. Say, it's good to be alive in such a place. And you," he gazed inquiringly into the man's strong face, "you began it from--the beginning?"

"I built the first ranch house with my own hands. My old wife an' I built up this ranch and ran it. And now it's rich and big--she's gone.

She never saw it win out. Hazel's took her place, and it's been for her to see it grow to what it is. She helped me ship my first single year's crop of twenty thousand beeves to the market ten years ago. She was a small kiddie then, and she cried her pretty eyes out when I told her they were going to the slaughter yards of Chicago. You see, she'd known most of 'em as calves."

"The work of it must be enormous," meditated Gordon, after a pause in which he had pictured that small child weeping over her lost calves.

"So," rumbled Mallinsbee. "We're used to it. I run thirty boys all the year round, and more at round-up. Guess if I was missing Hazel wouldn't be at a loss to carry on. She's a great ranchman. She knows it all."

"Wonderful," Gordon cried in admiration. "It's staggering to think of a girl like that handling this great concern."

"There's two foremen, though. They've been with us years," said the other simply.

But Gordon's wonder remained no less, and Mallinsbee went on--

"After breakfast we'll take a gun and get up into those woods yonder.

Maybe we'll put up a jack rabbit, or a blacktail deer. Anyway, I guess there's always a bunch of prairie chicken around."

"Fine," cried Gordon, all his sporting instincts banishing every other thought. "Which----"

But Hazel's voice interrupted him, summoning them both to breakfast.

"Come along, folks," she cried, "or the coffee 'll be cold."

The men hurried into the house. Gordon felt that there was nothing and no power on earth that could keep him from his breakfast in that delicious mountain air, with Hazel for his hostess.

The meal was all he anticipated. Simple, ample, wholesome country fare, with the accompaniment of perfect cooking. He ate with an appetite that set Hazel's merry eyes dancing, and her tongue accompanying them with an equally merry banter. And all the time Silas Mallinsbee looked on, and smiled, and rumbled an occasional remark.

After breakfast the two men set out with their guns.

"We're sure making Sunday service," said Hazel's father, glancing into the breech of his favorite gun.

Gordon concurred.

"Up in the woods there," he laughed.

"With a congregation of fur and feather," laughed Hazel.

"Which is as wholesome as petticoats an' swallowtails," said her father, "an' a good deal more healthy fer our bodies."

"But what about your souls?" inquired Hazel slyly.

"Souls?" Her father snapped the breech closed. "A soul's like a good sailin' ship. If she's driving on a lee shore it's through bad seamanship and the winds of heaven, and you can't save it anyway. If she ain't driving on a lee shore--well, I don't guess she needs saving."

"It's a great big scallywag," came through the open doorway after them, as they departed. The tenderness and affection in the manner of the girl's parting words made Gordon feel that his great host had some compensation for the absence of that mother who had blessed him with such a pledge of their love.

The two men were returning with their bag. It was not extensive, but it was select. A small blacktail was lying across Mallinsbee's broad shoulders. Gordon was carrying a large jack-rabbit, and several brace of prairie chicken. The younger man was enthusiastic over their sport.

"Talk to me of a city! Why, I could do this twice a day and every day, till I was blind and silly, and deaf and dumb. I sort of feel life don't begin to tell you things till you get out in the open, at the right end of a gun. Makes you feel sorry for the fellows chasing dollars in a city."

They were approaching the limits of a woodland bluff, from the edge of which the ranch would be in view.

"Guess that's how I've always felt--till little Hazel got without a mother," replied Mallinsbee. "After that--well, I just guess I needed other things to fill up spare thoughts."

Gordon's enthusiasm promptly lessened out of sympathy. Something of the loneliness of the ranch life--when one of the partners was taken--now occurred to him.

"Yes," he said earnestly, "the right woman's just the whole of a man's world. I guess there are circumstances when--this sun don't shine so bright. When a man feels something of the vastness and solitude of these hills, when their mystery sort of gets hold of him. I can get that--sure."

"Yep. It's just about then when a bit of coal makes all the difference," Mallinsbee smiled. "I wouldn't just call coal the gayest thing in life. But it's got its uses. When the summer's past, why, I guess the stoves of winter need banking."

Gordon nodded his understanding.

"But your daughter is just crazy on this life," he suggested.

The old man's smile had passed.

"Sure." Then he sighed. "She's been my partner ever since, sort of junior partner. But sometime she 'll be--going." Then his slow smile crept back into his eyes. "Then it'll be winter all the time. Then it'll have to be coal, an' again coal--right along."

They emerged from the woods, and instinctively Gordon gazed across at the distant ranch. In a moment he was standing stock still staring across the valley. And swiftly there leaped into his eyes a dangerous light. Mallinsbee halted, too. He shaded his eyes, and an ominous cloud settled upon his heavy brows.

"Some one driven out," he muttered, examining narrowly a team and buggy standing at the veranda.

Gordon emitted a sound that was like a laugh, but had no mirth in it.

"It's a man, and he's talking to Miss Mallinsbee on the veranda. It don't take me guessing his identity. That suit's fixed right on my mind."

"David Slosson," muttered Mallinsbee, and he hurried on at an increased pace.