The girl read first the four letters in the same handwriting, one to mark each week she had been on the round-up. The fifth was from Judge Colton, her father's old friend, to whose hands all his affairs had been entrusted. After scanning this she read again the other four. Ever since her last visit to the Coltons, just prior to her father's death, the arrival of these letters had been as regular as the recurrence of Sunday, one for each week, and in moments of despondency over the affairs of the Three Bar she drew strength from them. Very soon now, in the course of a few months at the outside, she and the writer would meet away from his native environment and in the midst of her own. Always before this had been reversed and her association with Carlos Deane had held a background of his own setting,--a setting in startling contrast to her log house, nestling in a desert of sage. The Deane house was a wonderful old-fashioned mansion set in a grove of century-old elms and oaks. She knew his life and now he would see her in her natural surroundings. Perhaps it was her very difference from other girls that had first interested Carlos Deane, and the fact that he stood out from others, even among his own intimates, that had drawn her interest to him. Deane had been an athlete of renown and a popular idol at school and his energy had been brought to bear in business as successfully as in play. In a hazy sort of way she felt that some day she would listen to the plea that, in some fashion or other, was woven into every letter; but not till the Three Bar was booming and no longer required her supervision. Everything else in the world was secondary to her love for her father's brand and the anxiety of the past two years of its decline eclipsed all other issues. Her reflections were interrupted by Harris's voice just outside her teepee. "Asleep, Billie?" he asked softly. "No," she said. "What is it?" "I've thrown your saddle on Papoose," he said. "Let's have a look around." She assented and they rode off up the left-hand slope of the valley. A mile or so from the wagon Harris dismounted on a high point. "Let's have a medicine chat," he offered. "I've got considerable on my mind." She leaned against a rock and he sat cross-legged on the ground, facing her and twisting a cigarette as an aid to thought. Her head was tilted back against the rock, her eyes half-closed. "They say folks get disappointed in love and go right on living," he observed. "I wonder now. I've met quite a scattering of girls and maybe there were a dozen or so out of the lot that sized up a shade better than the rest. Looking back from where I sit it occurs to me that it was a right colorless assortment, after all. I've heard that men run mostly to form and at one time or another let it out to some little lady that there's no other in the world. That's my own state right about now. Are you always going to keep on disliking me?"