When Juliet Bissell rode back to the Bar T ranch after her parting with Larkin at the fork of Grass Creek, she was a decidedly more thoughtful and sober young woman than she had been at the same hour the day previous.

Although blessed with an adoring father and a rather eccentric mother, she had, for the last year, begun to feel the stirrings of a tiny discontent.

Her life was a good example of the familiar mistake made by many a wealthy cattle-owner. Her parents, realizing their crudity and lack of education, had seen to it that she should be given all the advantages denied them, and had sent her East to Chicago for eight consecutive years.

During this time, while hating the noise and confinement of the city, she had absorbed much of its glamour, and enjoyed its alluring pleasures with a keen appreciation. Music had been her chief study, and her very decided talent had opened a 75 busy career for her had she chosen to follow it.

But Julie was true to her best instincts, and refused to consider such a thing. Her father and mother had done all in their power for her, she reasoned, and therefore it was but fair that she should return to them and make the closing years of their lives happy.

Though nothing had ever been said, the girl knew that when she had left the ranch house, even for a week’s visit with a girl friend two hundred miles away, the sun might as well have fallen from the heavens, considering the gloom that descended upon the Bar T.

It was this knowledge of their need for her that had brought her back to fulfill what she considered her greatest happiness and duty in life.

Now, a monkey cannot wear clothes, smoke cigarettes, perform before applauding audiences and return to the jungle without a certain feeling of hateful unfitness among his gibbering brethren.

No more could this wild, lovely creature of the plains become one of the most sought-after girls of Chicago’s North Shore set, and return to the painful prose of the Bar T ranch without paying the penalty.

With the glory of health and outdoor life, she 76 had failed to realize this, but since the sudden appearance of Bud Larkin she had done little else.

He had brought back to her a sudden powerful nostalgia for the life she had once known. And had old Beef Bissell been aware of this nostalgia, he would have realized for the first time that in his desire to give his daughter everything he had created a situation that was already unfortunate and might, with very little prompting, be unhappy.

But this knowledge was not vouchsafed to him, and Julie certainly would never make it plain.

The evening after Bud’s departure, that same evening, in fact, when he was fighting toward water with his flocks, the cattleman and his daughter sat outside on the little veranda that ran across the front of the ranch house.

“That feller Larkin,” remarked Bissell, terminating a long pause. “Kind of a dude or something back East, wasn’t he?”

“That’s what the punchers would call him, father,” returned the girl gravely. “But he was never anything but a gentleman in his treatment of me.”

“I don’t know what you mean exactly by that word ’gentleman,’ Julie, but I allow that no real man ever went into raisin’ sheep.” 77

“Perhaps not, dear,” she said, taking his rough, ungainly hand in both of hers, “but I think there is bound to be money in it. Mr. Larkin himself says that in the end the cattle will have to give way before the sheep.”

“An’ he thought he was tellin’ you something new when he said it, too, didn’t he? Well, I’ve knowed that fact for the last five years. That’s the main reason I won’t let his animals through my range. Once they get a foothold, there’s no stoppin’ ’em. Judas! I’m tired of fightin’ for things!”

“Poor father,” and the girl’s voice was full of tenderness. “You’re not discouraged, are you, dear?”

“No, Prairie Bell, but I reckon I’m gettin’ old, an’ I can’t get up the fight I used to. I thought I had my hands full with the rustlers, but now with the sheep comin’—well, between you and me, little girl, I wish I had somebody to stand up and take the licks.”

“There’s Mike; he certainly can give and take a few.”

“Yes, of course I’ve got Mike, but, when you’re all done, he’s only a foreman, an’ his interest don’t go much beyond his seventy-five a month an’ grub. Yet—by George!” He sat suddenly 78 erect and slapped his thigh with his disengaged hand.

“What is it?”

“Oh, nothin’.” They talked on in the affectionate, intimate way that had always characterized their relations since Julie had been a girl just big enough to listen to involved harangues about cattle without actually going to sleep. In the course of an hour Bissell suddenly asked:

“Did you ever think of marryin’, Prairie Bell?”

“If thinking ever helped any, I would have been a Mormon by this time.”

“Well, you are growed up, ain’t you?” and Bissell spoke in the wondering tone of a man who has just realized a self-evident fact “Fancy my little girl old enough to marry! How old are you, anyhow? ’Bout eighteen?”

“Twenty-five, you dear, old goose. Eighteen! The idea.”

“Well, twenty-five, then. Of course, Julie, when I die I will leave this place to you, and that’s what made me think about your marryin’. I want a good, sharp man to fight fer my cows an’ my range, a man that knows it and could make a success of it, an’ yet wouldn’t care because it was in your name.” 79

“Would you mind if I loved him a little bit, too?” asked the girl, with elaborately playful sarcasm.

“Bless you, no. Love him all you want to, but I ’low you couldn’t love a man very long who didn’t have all them qualifications I mentioned. I figger love out somethin’ like this. First there’s a rockbed of ability, then a top soil of decency, an’ out o’ these two, admiration kind o’ grows like corn. Of course you always grind up the corn and soak it with sentiment; then you’ve got mush. An’ the trouble with most people is they only think of the mush an’ forget the rock an’ the top soil.”

“Why, you old philosopher!” cried the girl, laughing and squeezing his big shoulders. “You’re awfully clever, really.” Which remark brought a confused but pleased blush to Bissell’s hard face that had become wonderfully soft and tender during this hour with his daughter.

“Now, see here,” went on the girl severely, “I think there’s something back of all this talk about marriage. What is it?”

Bissell looked at her, startled, not having expected to encounter feminine intuition.

“Nothin’, only I wish you could marry somebody that’d look out fer you the way I mentioned. 80 Then I could die happy, though I don’t expect to be on that list fer a long while.”

“Anybody in mind?” asked Julie banteringly.

“Well, not exactly,” hesitated her father, with another sharp glance. “But I allow I could dig up one if I tried very hard.”

“Go ahead and try.”

“Well, now there’s Billy Speaker over on the Circle Arrow, as gentle a man for a blond as I ever see.”

“I’ve only met him twice in my life,” remarked the girl. “Try again.”

“There’s Red Tarken, foreman on the M Square. He’d be good to yuh, I know, and he’s a hum-dinger about cows.”

“I am glad he has one qualification aside from his red hair,” put in Julie seriously. “However, I am afraid that as a husband Red would be about as steady as a bronco saddled for the first time after the winter feeding. He’d better have free range as long as he lives. Once more, father.”

“Well, see here, Julie, it seems to me you could do a lot worse than take our own Mike Stelton. I’ve never thought of it much before, but to-night it sort of occurred to me an’—”

Juliet Bissell broke into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, at which her father fixed her with 81 a regard as wondering as it was hurt. His cherished inspiration so tactfully approached had burst like a soap-bubble under the gale of Juliet’s merriment.

“Bud was right, after all,” said the girl, after her nervous outbreak. “He told me Mike had some silly hope or other, and I believe Stelton has given you absent treatment until you have made this suggestion. Father, he’s just as preposterous as the others.”

“I don’t agree with you,” contended Bissell stubbornly. “Mike is faithful, and has been for years. He knows the ins and outs of the business, and is willing to take the hard knocks that I’m getting tired of. Then there’s another thing. I could be half-blind an’ still see what Mike has been wanting these last five years.”

Juliet suddenly rose to her feet, all the laughter gone from her eyes and her heart. With a feeling of frightened helplessness she realized that her father was serious.

“Are you taking Mike’s part against me?” she asked calmly.

“Well, I still don’t see why you couldn’t marry him.”

“You’ve forgotten the mush, father, but that isn’t all. There’s something different about Mike 82 lately, something I have never noticed before. His eye seems shifty; he avoids all the family. If I didn’t know him so well, I should think he was a criminal. Leaving out the fact that I don’t love him, and that the very thought of his ever touching me makes me shudder, this distrust of him would be enough to block any such arrangements. Why”—and her lip curled scornfully—“I would marry Bud Larkin a hundred times rather than Mike Stelton once.”

“What!”

Bissell rose to his feet with the quiet, amazed exclamation. He could hardly credit his ears.

“Marry that dirty sheepman?” he continued in a tense, even voice. “I’d like to know what put that crazy notion in yore head. Don’t tell me you are in love with that dude.”

“No, I am not,” answered the girl just as evenly, “but I may as well tell you frankly, that he is the only man within a radius of three hundred miles who has certain things I must have in a husband. I’m sorry if I displease you, father!” she cried, going to him affectionately, “but I could never love any one not of our class.”

That diplomatic “our” did not deceive Bissell. For the first time he saw that the greatest treasure of his whole life had grown beyond 83 him; that there were needs and ideals in her existence of which he had but the faintest inkling, and that in her way she was as much of a “dude” as the man she had mentioned.

He was encountering the seemingly cruel fate of parents who glorify their children by their own immolation, and who watch those same children pass up and out of their humble range of vision and understanding nevermore to return. Henceforth he could never see his daughter without feeling his own lack of polish.

Such a moment of realization is bitter on both sides, but especially for the one who has given all and can receive less in return than he had before the giving. The iron of this bitterness entered into Beef Bissell’s soul as he stood there, silent, on the low, rickety veranda under the starlight of the plains.

With the queer vagary of a mind at great tension, his senses became particularly acute for a single moment. He saw the silver-pierced vault of the sky, smelled the fragrance of the plains borne on the gentle wind, and heard the rustle of the dappled cottonwoods and the howling of the distant coyotes.

Then he came back to the reality of the moment, and exhibited the simple greatness that had always 84 been his in dealings with his daughter. He slipped his heavy arm across her shoulders and drew her to him.

“Never mind, Prairie Bell,” he said gently. “You know best in everything. Do as your heart dictates.” He sighed and added: “I wish I was your mother to-night.”