"Four or five weeks ago," the landlord repeated, as though Alta spoke a foreign tongue and must be translated. "I see," said Lambert, vaguely, shaking to the tips of his fingers with a kind of buck ague that he never had suffered from before. He was afraid the landlord would notice it, and slewed his chair, getting out his tobacco to cover the fool spell. For that was she, Vesta Philbrook was she, and she was Vesta Philbrook. He knew it as well as he knew that he could count ten. Something had led him there that day; the force that was shaping the course of their two lives to cross again had held him back when he had considered selling his horse and going West a long distance on the train. He grew calmer when he had his cigarette alight. The landlord was talking again. "Funny thing about Vesta comin' home, too," he said, and stopped a little, as if to consider the humor of it. Lambert looked at him with a sudden wrench of the neck. "Which?" "Philbrook's luck held out, it looked like, till she got through her education. All through the fights he had and the scrapes he run into the last ten years he never got a scratch. Bullets used to hum around that man like bees, and he'd ride through 'em like they _was_ bees, but none of 'em ever notched him. Curious, wasn't it?" "Did somebody get him at last?" "No, he took typhoid fever. He took down about a week or ten days after Vesta got home. He died about a couple of week ago. Vesta had him laid beside her mother up there on the hill. He said they'd never run him out of this country, livin' or dead." Lambert swallowed a dry lump. "Is she running the ranch?" "Like an old soldier, sir. I tell you, I've got a whole lot of admiration for that girl." "She must have her hands full." "Night and day. She's short on fence-riders, and I guess if you boys are lookin' for a job you can land up there with Vesta, all right." Taterleg and the girl came out and sat on the green rustic bench at the farther end of the porch. It complained under them; there was talk and low giggling. "We didn't expect to strike anything this soon," Lambert said, his active mind leaping ahead to shape new romance like a magician. "You don't look like the kind of boys that'd shy from a job if it jumped out in the road ahead of you." "I'd hate for folks to think we would." "Ain't you the feller they call; the Duke of Chimney Butte?" "They call me that in this country." "Yes; I knew that horse the minute you rode up, though he's changed for the better wonderful since I saw him last, and I knew you from the descriptions I've heard of you. Vesta'd give you a job in a minute, and she'd pay you good money, too. I wouldn't wonder if she didn't put you in as foreman right on the jump, account of the name you've got up here in the Bad Lands." "Not much to my credit in the name, I'm afraid," said Lambert, almost sadly. "Do they still cut her fences and run off her stock?"