"What I meant ... mebby 't would be easier for us if you played like you was friends. Then she mightn't suspect." She rolled her saddle to its side and spread the blanket over it. "No. I can't do things that-a way, Alf,"--with a slow shake of her head. "Mebby 't would get us more ... but there's somethin' in me, in here,"--a palm to her breast--"that won't let me. I can steal her blind an' only be glad about it, but I couldn't make up like I was her friend while I done it." "Mebby ... mebby you would sure enough like her," he persisted. "You ain't never had no friends--" "I'd never like her, not while we're this way,"--with a gesture to include the litter about the cabin. "She's got all that I want. She's had all the things I've never had. She's got clothes, lots of pretty clothes; she's lived in towns an's always had things easy. She's got friends and folks to respect her. You can tell that by lookin' at her.... "What makes me that way, Alf? What makes me hate folks that have got the things I want?" He pulled on his mustache again and scanned the scarlet sky which rose above the purple heights to the westward. He shook his head rather helplessly and then looked at the girl who stood before him, the eagerness of her query showing in her eyes with an intensity that was almost desperate. "Mebby you get it from me. I've had it ... always. That's all I have had ... that an' hard luck." "But I don't like it!" she said and in the tone was something of the spirit of a bewildered little girl. "I'd like to be like other girls. I'd like to have friends ... girl friends, but the more I want 'em, the more I hate those that have 'em! "What's the matter with me, Alf?" "The same thing that's the matter with me, daughter: hard luck. I've wanted things so bad that not hevin' 'em has soured me. I've watched other outfits grow big an' rich an' nothin' like that has ever come my way. The bigger the rest got, the harder 't was for me to get along ... an' the worse I hated 'em!" There was no iron in his voice; just the whine of a weakling, dispirited to a point where his resentment at ill fortune, even, was a passive thing. "Why, she's got a fine house to live in, an' I'll bet she always had. She's never knowed what it was to set out a norther in a wagon. She's never lived on buckskin an' frozen spuds all winter. She's never been chased from one place to another.... "Folks respect her for what she's got. Why don't folks get respected for just what they are?" There was pathos in that query. The man answered: "It ain't what you are that matters, daughter. It's what you own." "You've always said that, ever since I can remember. Mebby if you hadn't said it so much, Alf, I wouldn't feel like I do." He shifted his footing uneasily and looked again at the flaring sky. "Well, it's so," he whined. "You'd have found it out yourself. I've brung you up the best I knowed how."