"Well, th' Captain ain't here now," he answered, beaming on her; "but VB'll be back with him before noon." She looked for what seemed to be an unnecessarily long time at her watch, and then asked: "Is that his name?" "What--th' Captain?" "No--VB." Jed laughed silently at her. "Yep--to be sure an' that's his name--all th' name he's got." "Well, I wish Mr. VB would hurry back with the Captain," she said. But that easy flush was again in her cheeks, and the turn she gave the conversation was, as they say in certain circles, poor footwork. Within an hour the Captain bore his rider home. Gail stayed for dinner and ate with the two men. It was a strange meal for VB. Not in months had he eaten at the same table with a woman; not in years had he broken bread with a woman such as this, and realization of the fact carried him back beyond those darkest days. He remembered suddenly and quite irrelevantly that he once had wondered if this daughter of Bob Thorpe's was to be a connecting link with the old life. That had been when he first learned that the big cattleman had a daughter, and that she was living in his East. Now as he sat before neglected food and watched and listened, feasting his starved spirit on her, noting her genuine vivacity, her enthusiasm, the quick come and go of color in her fine skin, he knew that she was a link, but not with the past that he had feared. She took him back beyond that, into his earlier boyhood, that period of adolescence when, to a clean-minded boy, all things are good and unstained. She was attractive in all the ways that women can be attractive, and at the same time she was more than a desirable individual; she seemed to stand for classes, for modes of living and thinking, that Young VB had put behind him--put behind first by his wasting, now by distance. But as the meal progressed a fresh wonder crept up in his mind. Was all that really so very far away? Was not the distance just that between them and the big ranch house under the cotton woods beyond the hills? And was the result of his wasting quite irreparable? Was he not rebuilding what he had torn down?