“Hush!” said Santa again, laying her fingers upon his mouth. “There’s no queen here. Do you know who I am? I am Santa Yeager, First Lady of the Bedchamber. Come here.” She dragged him from the gallery into the room to the right. There stood a cradle with an infant in it—a red, ribald, unintelligible, babbling, beautiful infant, sputtering at life in an unseemly manner. “There’s no queen on this ranch,” said Santa again. “Look at the king. He’s got your eyes, Webb. Down on your knees and look at his Highness.” But jingling rowels sounded on the gallery, and Bud Turner stumbled there again with the same query that he had brought, lacking a few days, a year ago. “‘Morning. Them beeves is just turned out on the trail. Shall I drive ’em to Barber’s, or—” He saw Webb and stopped, open-mouthed. “Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!” shrieked the king in his cradle, beating the air with his fists. “You hear your boss, Bud,” said Webb Yeager, with a broad grin—just as he had said a year ago. And that is all, except that when old man Quinn, owner of the Rancho Seco, went out to look over the herd of Sussex cattle that he had bought from the Nopalito ranch, he asked his new manager: “What’s the Nopalito ranch brand, Wilson?” “X Bar Y,” said Wilson. “I thought so,” said Quinn. “But look at that white heifer there; she’s got another brand—a heart with a cross inside of it. What brand is that?” II THE RANSOM OF MACK Me and old Mack Lonsbury, we got out of that Little Hide-and-Seek gold mine affair with about $40,000 apiece. I say “old” Mack; but he wasn’t old. Forty-one, I should say; but he always seemed old. “Andy,” he says to me, “I’m tired of hustling. You and me have been working hard together for three years. Say we knock off for a while, and spend some of this idle money we’ve coaxed our way.” “The proposition hits me just right,” says I. “Let’s be nabobs for a while and see how it feels. What’ll we do—take in the Niagara Falls, or buck at faro?” “For a good many years,” says Mack, “I’ve thought that if I ever had extravagant money I’d rent a two-room cabin somewhere, hire a Chinaman to cook, and sit in my stocking feet and read Buckle’s History of Civilisation.” “That sounds self-indulgent and gratifying without vulgar ostentation,” says I; “and I don’t see how money could be better invested. Give me a cuckoo clock and a Sep Winner’s Self-Instructor for the Banjo, and I’ll join you.” A week afterwards me and Mack hits this small town of Piña, about thirty miles out from Denver, and finds an elegant two-room house that just suits us. We deposited half-a-peck of money in the Piña bank and shook hands with every one of the 340 citizens in the town. We brought along the Chinaman and the cuckoo clock and Buckle and the Instructor with us from Denver; and they made the cabin seem like home at once.