Dad looked fondly and sentimentally at Raquel. Stern overlord, shrewd cattleman and financier, Old Man Daniels was tender, if strict, with his family; and proud, particularly of his only daughter. “I’m not tellin’ ye to be a man, Rakie. I don’t want for ye to be. We got men enough in the fam’ly. And Georgie here is the man of the place to look after the women folks. He’s been as good as two hands since Grant and Custer left.” It was true that Raquel knew each trick of grazing, branding, the business of the roundup, the horses. She had been keeping books for her father after a crude way of her own before she left for school, and the three months’ training in accounting she had taken would make it infinitely easier now. She knew the packing houses and commission merchants with whom her father dealt; she followed the market quotations on beef which he read laboriously from the Sunday paper every week, as a matter of course--as other girls follow hat sales. She knew the business of shipping, from the drive down to the railroad yards to the telegram announcing the shipment of the cattle. But this would be an unusually hard year. Before Raquel lay the problem of looking after the herd that remained, with four boys instead of the twelve or fourteen they usually had in the summer; bringing the leaner cattle or the weaklings down to the corrals to be fed up, riding the range to keep an eye on the new calves in the spring, especially if it should be a cold or late season; and then, after the rodeo and branding, the job of selling, feeding the cattle before shipping, and delivering safely to the yards. But that was all work which a good overseer could handle. Today Dad’s business had grown to such proportions that the financial end of it was half the work. “The main thing you’ll have to handle, Raquel,” Dad said, looking keenly at her, “is meetin’ our notes. Thirty thousand dollars on the Valley Grant land, due April first, and the interest on our other two loans. “That means you’ll ship at least a thousand head of cattle early in March. “I wouldn’t have expanded so much, takin’ in extra range, if I’d realized I’d have to be leavin’ it all to you like this. “Bein’ as we’re borrowed up to the hilt, if anything should come up unexpected we’d have to turn over our cattle quick. The banks have all loaned the limit to the stockmen this fall, and although I stood to make a fortune, I’m afeared there’s trouble ahead for the stockmen. “A. B. Meyers has been made director in our bank to succeed me. You know he’s swore to git me for callin’ that note of his two years ago?” Dad chewed his long mustache. “As a matter of fact if he hadn’t been forced to draw in and sell some o’ his stock, he’d be broke and most likely rustlin’ cattle to start a new herd today.