Bud had no answer for that. But a mile later, when the pines swallowed him, one small phrase came out of all the wonderment. “Son of a gun, just look what’s happened to us to-day!” The peace--and the monotony--which had enfolded him during the last hot summer month was gone. Life was just one dog-goned problem after another. That’s what made living endurable. “G’ap, Toby. We got to figger around this summow. There’s a couple plumb in love with each other an’ wantin’ to make up. But they’d die afore they’d admit it. Got to fix that.” He found as the week went along that all ordinary conciliatory means had no effect. The quarrel had gone too far, endured too long. The battle had arrived at a stage of siege. It worried him, for the robust storekeeper was not a man to stand by and watch the tide carry “his people” downstream. Faith had made him the prophet and leader of the homesteaders. He loved them and fought for them, took an unreasoning interest in their small affairs, argued with them, cursed them, and, at the last word when it seemed they could no longer struggle against the eternal hardships, gave his own time and money to keep the small flame of courage in their hearts. They were all, Bud believed, in a common brotherhood, striving for a common happiness and every sorrow and discouragement they suffered was sure to find its way eventually to his own big heart. He had no means of knowing the nature of the quarrel, but still he worked shrewdly to dispel it. The day after the girl had settled on the homestead, Bud saddled the gentlest horse of his lot and sent it over to her by “Slivers” Gilstrap, a passing cow hand. “You tell her, Slivers, that I’ll be over after a while with the necessary filin’ doodads, an’ that she’d better ask Jim Hunter to fix that lock on the door.” Late that night Slivers came back with blood in his eye. “Say, you ol’ galoot, what’d you go an’ tell me to tell her that for? Minute I says it she flies off’n the handle an’ says she ain’t askin’ Jim fer nuthin’. I thought mebbe he’d insulted her an’, bein’ a gentleman, offers to shoot him er hog tie him, er anything. Dog-goned if she didn’t larrup me, then.” Thereupon Bud went to Bend and rode back to the girl’s place with filing papers, another sage move up his sleeve. But he had no chance to act upon it. Mary, dressed in some kind of old clothes and already freckled by the sun, met him with fire in her eyes. “Mr. Bud, I wish you’d go over and tell Jim Hunter I forbid him coming on my land! He’s been here twice trying to browbeat me! You tell him I don’t want but one thing from him, and that’s an apology. Otherwise I’ll use this pistol. I will!” She flourished the heavy weapon in her hand and the storekeeper, suppressing a chuckle, noted that she used both hands to raise it. It would have been disastrous to offer advice then. “Mebbe,” he gravely offered, “I’d better notify the sher’ff to arrest him fer trespassin’.”