“You said it!” returned Hurley emphatically. “I pretty near stifle when I get into a city and have to stay a spell. When I get back to this I feel like a boy again.” He smiled reflectively. “The bard of ‘Cactus Center’ hits off my feelings to a fare-ye-well,” and he proceeded to repeat from “The Forester’s Return:” “‘I’m back on the job by the singing river, Far from the town with its money-mad, Back where the quaking aspens quiver— And I’m glad. There’s work to do and there’s work in plenty, And it’s sleep in the open if fate so wills; But no man is more than one-and-twenty In the hills.’” “That is fine!” Betty cried with enthusiasm, her eyes sparkling as they seldom did. “Why, I can almost feel that way myself, sometimes.” There was a drop in her tone at the end. She looked away and, had he been able to see into her eyes then, he would have beheld a much different expression in their dimmed depths. “You’d feel like it always if you’d just let yourself, Miss Betty,” Hurley said, with sudden warmth. She smiled a little doubtfully, but turned toward him again, having recovered her composure. Joe’s eyes glowed and a strange pallor rose under his tan. “Just think of living out here all your days and enjoying every moment of them! It’s rough, I know, and sort of untamed. But it’s a good life, Miss Betty—a wonderful life!” “You—you almost convince me,” she stammered, laughing a little uncertainly, yet gazing at him with a dawning light in her eyes that Joe had not seen there before. It emboldened him; it inspired him to speak the words that were boiling under the surface of his calm. He was a forthright fellow at best, was Joe Hurley, and he was very, very much in love with Betty Hunt. CHAPTER XVII—A BATTLE IN A GIRL’S HEART “Betty, I want to tell you something,” he said, unconsciously urging Bouncer nearer to the girl’s mount. “These weeks you have been here at Canyon Pass have been the greatest in my life.” The girl looked at him in a startled way. “This is a big country, it is true. Big things are done out here—great accomplishments achieved—fortunes won. And I have always meant to do my part in it—both as to making money and winning the better things of life for myself. I want to see things that are already started, developed, to watch Canyon Pass grow—in a spiritual as well as a material sense. “But something else has got hold of me, Betty. I was living a pretty wild life before you and Willie came out here. I wrote him I was. I kind of gloried in being a roughneck, I reckon,” he added with a wry smile. “But all that’s changed with me now, Betty—since you came.” “Mr. Hurley—Joe!” gasped the girl. But he raised his hand gently in protest. The gesture asked her to wait—to hear him through.