"I could never make up my mind. All sorts of rumors come to us concerning him. As a matter of fact, the State authorities sympathized with the cattle-barons, and my own opinion is that your father was permitted to escape. He was afterward seen in Texas, and later it was reported that he had been killed there." The girl sat still, listening to the tireless whir of the machine, and looking out at the purpling range with tear-mist eyes. At last she said: "I shall never think of my father as a bad man, he was always so gentle to me." "You need not condemn him, my dear young lady. First of all, it's not fair to bring him (as he was in those days) forward into these piping times of dairy cows and alfalfa. The people of the Forks--some of them, at least--consider him a traitor, and regard you as the daughter of a renegade, but what does it matter? Each year sees the Old West diminish, and already, in the work of the Forest Service, law and order advance. Notwithstanding all the shouting of herders and the beating to death of sheep, no hostile shot has ever been fired within the bounds of a National Forest. In the work of the forest rangers lies the hope of ultimate peace and order over all the public lands." The girl fell silent again, her mind filled with larger conceptions of life than her judgment had hitherto been called upon to meet. She knew that Redfield was right, and yet that world of the past--the world of the swift herdsman and his trampling, long-horned, half-wild kine still appealed to her imagination. The West of her girlhood seemed heroic in memory; even the quiet account of it to which she had just listened could not conceal its epic largeness of movement. The part which troubled her most was her father's treachery to his neighbors. That he should fight, that he should kill men in honorable warfare, she could understand; but not his recreancy, his desertion of her mother and herself. She came back to dwell at last on the action of that slim young soldier who had calmly ridden through the infuriated mob. She remembered that she had thrilled even then at the vague and impersonal power which he represented. To her childish mind he seemed to bear a charm, like the heroes of her story-books--something which made him invulnerable. After a long pause Redfield spoke again. "The memory of your father will make life for a time a bit hard for you in Roaring Fork--perhaps your mother's advice is sound. Why not come to Sulphur City, which is almost entirely of the new spirit?" "If I can get my mother to come, too, I will be glad to do so, for I hate the Fork; but I will not leave her there, sick and alone." "Much depends upon the doctor's examination to-morrow."