With the glory of health and outdoor life, she had failed to realize this, but since the sudden appearance of Bud Larkin she had done little else. He had brought back to her a sudden powerful nostalgia for the life she had once known. And had old Beef Bissell been aware of this nostalgia, he would have realized for the first time that in his desire to give his daughter everything he had created a situation that was already unfortunate and might, with very little prompting, be unhappy. But this knowledge was not vouchsafed to him, and Julie certainly would never make it plain. The evening after Bud's departure, that same evening, in fact, when he was fighting toward water with his flocks, the cattleman and his daughter sat outside on the little veranda that ran across the front of the ranch house. "That feller Larkin," remarked Bissell, terminating a long pause. "Kind of a dude or something back East, wasn't he?" "That's what the punchers would call him, father," returned the girl gravely. "But he was never anything but a gentleman in his treatment of me." "I don't know what you mean exactly by that word 'gentleman,' Julie, but I allow that no real man ever went into raisin' sheep." "Perhaps not, dear," she said, taking his rough, ungainly hand in both of hers, "but I think there is bound to be money in it. Mr. Larkin himself says that in the end the cattle will have to give way before the sheep." "An' he thought he was tellin' you something new when he said it, too, didn't he? Well, I've knowed that fact for the last five years. That's the main reason I won't let his animals through my range. Once they get a foothold, there's no stoppin' 'em. Judas! I'm tired of fightin' for things!" "Poor father," and the girl's voice was full of tenderness. "You're not discouraged, are you, dear?" "No, Prairie Bell, but I reckon I'm gettin' old, an' I can't get up the fight I used to. I thought I had my hands full with the rustlers, but now with the sheep comin'--well, between you and me, little girl, I wish I had somebody to stand up and take the licks." "There's Mike; he certainly can give and take a few." "Yes, of course I've got Mike, but, when you're all done, he's only a foreman, an' his interest don't go much beyond his seventy-five a month an' grub. Yet--by George!" He sat suddenly erect and slapped his thigh with his disengaged hand. "What is it?" "Oh, nothin'." They talked on in the affectionate, intimate way that had always characterized their relations since Julie had been a girl just big enough to listen to involved harangues about cattle without actually going to sleep. In the course of an hour Bissell suddenly asked: "Did you ever think of marryin', Prairie Bell?" "If thinking ever helped any, I would have been a Mormon by this time."