Harry knew who Ludlum was--the stockman who shipped twice as many cattle as any other man living on the railway line. A new town had grown up around the station that had been put in to accommodate him. "Don't you get lonesome up in these hills, young lady?" Ludlum inquired. "Not very. There's too much to do. All summer there's work on the place and every winter I've taught school down on the flat." "Saving up to get you an auto?" asked the stockman with a laugh. "Saving up for cattle," Harry replied. "So! You're going into stock, are you? I thought all the ranchers up here on the prairie were grain crazy." "Most of them are; but my brother says the money is in feeding what you raise. 'Ship it on the hoof, not in the sack' is his motto." "And a mighty good one, too. Those your cows down yonder?" He was leaning on his saddle horn, pointing down the draw. From where they stood they could look between the steep, rocky walls of the buttes upon a wonderful picture of the ranch, narrow, but immensely long. Beginning with the garden on the upper end of the slope below the glen, it widened as it descended, taking in the green-blinded white cottage with its porch and young shade trees, the corral with its long stock sheds, the deep-green alfalfa, the emerald of winter wheat, the shaded browns of fall-plowed earth and, across the creek, the tossing sea of scab land, the flat of Camas Prairie and the mountains. To complete it, strung out along the creek, was Rob's bunch of cattle. Harry felt very proud of them. On the very day of her arrival in Idaho Rob had bargained for a little bunch of heifers. They were now cows with their calves beside them, and in her mind's eye Harry always saw them multiplied a hundred-fold, into the herd they were working for. "That ain't all you've got, is it?" asked Ludlum. "That's all," admitted Harry, and felt suddenly how small a herd of forty head must look to the stockman. In a country where everything ran in big numbers, from the miles that you lived from the post office to the feet of snow and degrees below zero, it sounded "small farmerish" to have so few heads of stock. "You've got the right sort of place for a stock ranch," Ludlum told her. "Have you proved up yet?" "We have on the original hundred and sixties; but we've filed on additional homesteads. We'll prove up on those next spring. That will give us six hundred and forty acres; about half of it seeded--pasture and hay. We plan to stay in here this winter. We've both saved up some money, and it looks as if we were going to have plenty of hay." "You've thought it all out ahead, I see," Ludlum said, with a sort of surprised admiration. For "tenderfoot" Easterners Holliday and his sister seemed very practical and businesslike. An idea swung slowly round into his thoughts. He was silent for a moment as he gazed down at the ranch.