Now, you want to know how Marian managed to live through that. I will say that she discovered how tenaciously a young man's arms may cling when he thinks he is embracing merely his mother; but she freed herself and ran to Eddie, fairly pulled him off his horse, and talked very fast and incoherently to him and Jerry, asking question after question without waiting for a reply to any of them. All this, I suppose, in the hope that they would not hear, or, hearing, would not understand what that terrible, wonderful little woman was saying so innocently. But you cannot faze youth. Eddie had important news for Sis, and he felt that now was the time to tell it before Marian blushed any redder, so he pulled her face up to his, put his lips so close to her ear that his breath tickled, and whispered--without any preface whatever that she could marry Bud any time now, because she was a widow. “Here! Somebody--Bud--quick! Sis has fainted! Doggone it, I only told her Lew's dead and she can marry you--shucks! I thought she'd be glad!” Down on the Staked Plains, on an evening much like the evening when Bud came home with his “stake” and his hopes and two black sheep who were becoming white as most of us, a camp-fire began to crackle and wave smoke ribbons this way and that before it burned steadily under the supper pots of a certain hungry, happy group which you know. “It's somewhere about here that I got lost from camp when I was a kid,” Bud observed, tilting back his hat and lifting a knee to snap a dry stick over it. “Mother'd know, I bet. I kinda wish we'd brought her and dad along with us. That's about eighteen years ago they trailed a herd north--and here we are, taking our trail--herd north on the same trail! I kinda wish now I'd picked up a bunch of yearling heifers along with our two-year-olds. We could have brought another hundred head just as well as not. They sure drive nice. Mother would have enjoyed this trip.” “You think so, do you?” Marian gave him a superior little smile along with the coffee-boiler. “If you'd heard her talk about that trip north when there weren't any men around listening, you'd change your mind. Bud Birnie, you are the SIMPLEST creature! You think, because a woman doesn't make a fuss over things, she doesn't mind. Your mother told me that it was a perfect nightmare. She taught you music just in the hope that you'd go back to civilization and live there where there are some modern improvements, and she could visit you! And here you are--all rapped up in a bunch of young stock, dirty as pig and your whiskers--ow! Bud! Stop that immediatly, or I'll go put my face in a cactus just for relief!”