So the girl's schooling was cut short--and Frances loved books and the training she had received at the Amarillo schools. She would have loved to go on--to pass her examinations for college preparation, and finally get her diploma and an A. B., at least, from some college. That, however, was not to be. Old Captain Rugley lavished money on her like rain, when she would let him. She used some of the money to buy books and a piano and pay for a teacher for the latter to come to the ranch, while she spent much midnight oil studying the books by herself. Captain Rugley's health was not all it should have been. Frances could not now leave him for long. Until recently the old ranchman had borne lightly his seventy years. But rheumatism had taken hold upon him and he did not stand as straight as of old, nor ride so well. He was far from an invalid; but Frances realized--more than he did, perhaps--that he had finished his scriptural span of life, and that his present years were borrowed from that hardest of taskmasters, Father Time. Often it was Frances who rode the ranges, instead of Captain Rugley, viewing the different herds, receiving the reports of underforemen and wranglers, settling disputes between the punchers themselves, looking over chuck outfits, buying hay, overseeing brandings, and helping cut out fat steers for the market trail. There was nothing Frances of the ranges did not know about the cattle-raising business. And she was giving some attention to the new grain-raising ideas that had come into the Panhandle with the return of the first-beaten farming horde. For the Texas Panhandle has had its two farming booms. The first advance of the farmers into the ranges twenty-five years or more before had been a rank failure. "They came here and plowed up little spots in our parsters that air eyesores now," one old cowman said, "and then beat it back East when they found it didn't rain 'cordin' ter schedule. This land ain't good for nothin' 'cept cows." But this had been in the days of the old unfenced ranges, and before dry-farming had become a science. Now the few remaining cattlemen kept their pastures fenced, and began to think of raising other feed than river-bottom hay. The cohorts of agriculturists were advancing; the cattlemen were falling back. The ancient staked plains of the Spanish _conquestadors_ were likely to become waving wheat fields and smiling orchards. The young girl and her companion could not travel fast to the Bar-T ranch-house for two reasons: Pratt Sanderson was sore all over, and the mountain lion slung across Frances' pony caused some trouble. The pinto objected to carrying double--especially when an occasional draft of evening air brought the smell of the lion to her nostrils.