His face cleared. It was her way of telling him that she was ready to forgive and be forgiven. “Yes.” Then, abruptly, “Reckon I get off wrong foot first sometimes, honey.” He was in a big armchair. She went over to him, sat down on his knees, and kissed him. “’S all right, Dad,” she nodded with an effect of boyish brusqueness. Betty, too, had a mental postscript and expressed it. “It’s that boy. Nothing to do about it, of course. He wouldn’t let me do a thing for him, but--Oh, well, I just can’t get him off my mind. Kinda silly of me.” “Not silly at all,” demurred Clint. “Feel that way myself--only more so.” He cleared his throat for a confession. “Fact is, Bess, he’s managed to put me in a hole. Or else I’ve put myself there. It’s that infernal quick temper of mine. I’d no business to let myself go. Of course, I was figurin’ him just a bum like the others, an’ for that matter he is a tramp--” “He quoted Shakespeare at me,” inserted Betty, by way of comment. “I dare say. He’s no ignorant fool. I didn’t mean that. What was it he called me?” The ranchman smiled ruefully. “A local God Almighty on tin wheels! Maybe I do act like one.” “Sometimes,” agreed Betty. The smile that went with the word robbed her concurrence of its sting. It was tender and understanding, expressed the world-old superiority of her sex over the blundering male who had always claimed mastership. There were times when Betty was a mother to her father, times when Clint marveled at the wisdom that had found lodgment in the soft young body of this vivid creature who was heritor of his life and yet seemed so strangely and wonderfully alien to it. “Point is that I didn’t measure up to my chance and he did,” Reed went on gloomily. “It don’t set well with me, honey. After I’d thrashed him till he couldn’t stand, he goes right away an’ fights for you because you’re a woman. Makes me look pretty small, I’ll say. I’d like to take him by the hand and tell him so. But he wouldn’t have it that way. I’ve got to play my cards the way he’s dealt ’em. Can’t say I blame him, either.” “No, he had a right to refuse to have anything more to do with us after the way we’d treated him.” “Mostly we get second chances in this life, but we don’t always, Bess. Oh, well, no use crying over spilt milk. What’s done’s done.” “Yes,” she agreed. “Don’t worry, Dad. I did my best to get him to stay--went down on my knees almost. But he wouldn’t. There’s something queer about him. What is it? He acts as though he doesn’t care what becomes of him, as though he’s let go somehow. Did you notice that?” “Going to the devil fast as he can, looked like to me.” This was probably accurate enough as a summary, but it did not explain why to Betty. She dismissed the subject for the moment, because Ruth came into the room followed by Bridget.