One day he came bearing the ring I have described, and shyly offered it to her, insisting that she must place it on her engagement finger, which she did, never dreaming that the boys, keenly watching from the bunk-house, had put him up to it, telling him that that was the way white lovers did, and that once she put on his ring she was his by all the laws and customs of the white man. When Cameron, who was away at the time, heard of it, he was furious, and went straight to Miss Steele and urged her to return the ring and banish the Indian from the ranch. But she, seeing that back of his lover's eagerness for her safety was a lover's jealousy as well, affected not to believe him, and declared her intention of keeping and wearing the ring. It was this ring that she had kissed so tragically and replaced on her hand. On leaving the ranch, the girl gave her pony an almost free rein for the first two or three miles. It was a glorious morning in September, when the sun had lost its greatest power, and the air was fairly intoxicating in its freshness. The range never looked finer than it did now, after the summer rains had covered it with a wonderful growth of grass dotted with millions of daisies, black-eyed Susans, purple lupines, and dozens of other varieties of prairie flowers, which, in places, fairly made the air heavy with their perfume. The trail led her over a wide mesa, and at its highest point she stopped her pony and drank in the wondrous scene. Away off to the north the great tablelands, or mesas, where live the snake-loving Moqui Indians, hung in an almost indescribable grandeur, blue and misty against the sky, more like a mirage than a reality. A couple of saucy prairie dogs barked shrilly at her from their adjacent village; a coyote, disturbed by her coming, skulked hastily away from where he had been trying to surprise a little calf, left lying under a sagebush while its mother went on down the trail to water. Above her, high in the heavens, idly circled half a dozen heavy-winged turkey-buzzards, those scavengers of the prairies, a sure sign that somewhere below them an animal lay dead and they were gathering for a feast. As far as the eye could reach were rolling hills, with here and there parks of cedars, while scattered over the prairie were hundreds of cattle and horses, for George Hull was one of the heaviest cattle-owners in northern Arizona, and this was the heart of his range.