Betty looked at her little sister dubiously. “It’ll be a hard climb for those little legs, and she’s too heavy to carry far. We’d better leave her in the car.” “Maybe we had,” assented her father, and added, in a low voice: “If she’ll stay alone.” “Oh, Ruthie doesn’t mind that. Do you, dearest, a big girl like you? You’ll have Baby Fifi, and we’ll not be gone half an hour.” Ruth accepted her sister’s judgment without demur. She would rather play with Baby Fifi than tire herself climbing the long hill. “Stay right in the car, dear. Daddy and Betty won’t be long,” the young woman said, waving a hand as she started. Betty breasted the slope with the light, free step of a mountaineer. Though slender, she was far from frail. Tested muscles moved with perfect coördination beneath the smooth satiny skin. At sight of her an eye leveled behind a surveyor’s transit became instantly alive. The man caught his breath and watched eagerly. In her grace was something fawnlike, a suggestion of sylvan innocence and naïveté. Was it the quality of which this was an expression that distinguished her from a score of other nice girls he knew? Did she still retain from the childhood of the race a primal simplicity the others had lost by reason of their environment? What was it Wordsworth had written?-- “... trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home.” The glory still haloed her dusky head. It glowed in her warm eyes and sparkled in her smile. He strode through the kinnikinnick to meet them. As they approached, Betty was conscious of a sharp stab of joy. This clean-cut, light-footed man was not the shuffling, slouchy tramp she had first met two months earlier. The skin had taken on the bronzed hue of health. The eyes were no longer dull and heavy, but quick with life. The unpleasant, bitter expression had gone from the good-looking face. Betty knew what had transformed him. He had found again the self-reliance of which he had been robbed. There burned in him once more a bright light of manhood strong and unwavering. He shook hands with Clint Reed so frankly that she knew he cherished no grudge. There flashed into her mind the hesitant prophecy she had once made, that he might look back on that first day on the Diamond Bar K as a red-letter one. It had come true. Then he had reached the turning of the ways and had been led into the long hard uphill climb toward self-respect. “Glad to see you,” he said as his fingers met firmly those of the girl. “You’ve come to see how Mr. Merrick is getting along with the project, I suppose.” “We heard about the trouble here and came to find out the facts first-hand,” Reed answered. The engineer told what he knew. One of his assistants standing near was drawn into the conversation. The cattleman asked him questions. Betty and the man who called himself Tug Jones found themselves momentarily alone.