Doctor Wilson, arriving from Tellurium on the third day after the encounter at Paradise, found Huntington in a bad way, due not so much to the wound in his left shoulder as to the state of his mind. Haig's bullet was extracted without difficulty or serious complications, but Haig's words were encysted too deep for any probe. Huntington's self-love had been dealt a mortal blow; and somebody must pay for it. First of all it was Claire that paid; then Marion. He did not mean to be disagreeable to them, but never having cultivated self-restraint he had none of it now to ease the days of his convalescence. He filled the house with his clamor, and required as much attention as an ailing child. There were just two ways to keep him quiet. Claire soothed him when she sat at his bedside, with one of his huge "paws" held in her tiny hands; and Marion found, somewhat to her surprise, that Seth liked music. The piano was one of the wonders of the Huntington house, for pianos are not essential instruments in the equipment of cattle ranches, and this was the only one in all that region of cattledom. In music Seth's tastes were sentimental. "Lost Chords" and "Rosaries" subdued him almost to tears; and if Marion only brought him tuneful violets every morn he tried his best to be good. So when Claire was not on duty at the bedside Marion must needs be on duty at the piano,--an ordeal that Claire endured, of course, more patiently than Marion. Claire was almost comically unfit to be a ranchman's wife, and she too had been a trial on occasions. She was small and delicate, but vivacious, amiable, bright. Her blue eyes always had a childlike wonder in them, and she was fond of wearing her fluffy, golden hair in a girlish knot low on her neck, or even in a long, thick braid down her back, with a blue ribbon bow at the end. She flitted about the house like a butterfly, and yet she had managed somehow to make her home the marvel of Paradise Park. To begin with it was the ordinary, one-story, rambling house of pine, with spruce-clad hills rising behind it, and a little stream, rollicking down between it and the corrals. But a wide veranda had been constructed on three sides of it, furnished with wicker chairs, and half-screened with boxes of growing flowers. All around the house flowers grew,--old-fashioned garden flowers, roses and geraniums; beds of them everywhere, and blossoming shrubs along the stream.