“The old codger is just like tinder,” laughed Garry. “Lights up if a spark gets to him. And I unfortunately and unintentionally applied the spark. He’s gone off to Alaska mad as a hatter and left me in the lurch. And we were chums when I was a kid and until I came back from college.” “You mean you have quarreled with your uncle?” Dorothy queried, with some seriousness. “Not at all, Miss Dale,” he declared, promptly. “The old fellow quarreled with me. They say it takes two to make a quarrel. That’s not always so. One can do it just as _e-easy_. At least, one like Uncle Terrence can. He had red hair when he was young, and he has a strong fighting Irish strain in him. The row began over nothing and ended with his lighting out between evening and sunrise and leaving me flat. “Of course, I broke into a job with Bob Douglas right away——” “Do you mean, Mr. Knapp, that your uncle went away and left you without money?” Dorothy asked. “Only what I chanced to have in my pocket,” Garry Knapp said cheerfully. “He’d always been mighty good to me. Put me through school and all that. All I have is a piece of land—and a good big piece—outside of Desert City; but it isn’t worth much. Cattle raising is petering out in that region. Last year the mouth and hoof disease just about ruined the man that grazed my land. His cattle died like flies. “Then, the land was badly grazed by sheepmen for years. Sheep about poison land for anything else to live on,” he added, with a cattleman’s usual disgust at the thought of “mutton on the hoof.” “One thing I’ve come East for, Miss Dale, is to sell that land. Got a sort of tentative offer by mail. Bob wanted a lot of stuff for the ranch and for his family and couldn’t come himself. So I combined his business and mine and hope to make a sale of the land my father left me before I go back. “Then, with that nest-egg, I’ll try to break into some game that will offer a man-sized profit,” and Garry Knapp laughed again in his mellow, whole-souled way. “Isn’t he just a _dear_?” whispered Tavia as Garry turned to speak to the waiter. “Don’t you love to hear him talk?” “And have you never heard from your old uncle who went away and left you?” Dorothy asked. “Not a word. He’s too mad to speak, let alone write,” and a cloud for a moment crossed the open, handsome face of the Westerner. “But I know where he is, and every once in a while somebody writes me telling me Uncle Terry is all right.” “But, an old man, away up there in Alaska——?” “Bless you, Miss Dale,” chuckled Garry Knapp. “That dear old codger has been knocking about in rough country all his days. He’s always been a miner. Prospected pretty well all over our West. He’s made, and then bunted away, big fortunes sometimes. “He always has a stake laid down somewhere. Never gets real poor, and never went hungry in his life—unless he chanced to run out of grub on some prospecting tour, or his gun was broken and he couldn’t shoot a jackrabbit for a stew.