Until now he had been quite content with life as he found it. It had afforded him infinite pleasure, it bubbled up sparklingly from the fountain of contented youth, there had been no need for him to seek to change its flashing current. Moreover, he had never had an incentive to bestir himself. But that incentive had come now, a two-pronged goad; he was compelled to look to himself, to his own positive effort, for what came next. Vaguely, at first, he realised that a man if he be a man, has certain responsibilities. He saw clearly, now that he considered life seriously, that a man might err in dalliance and idleness just as he had erred; and he saw too that a man might, like Sledge Hume, go to the other extreme. A man might grow soft muscled literally and figuratively in slothful carelessness, or he might grow hard until he became a machine. He felt dimly that he ought to be doing something like other men. He wanted his life to live freely as he knew how, largely as he sought to learn how. And he wanted Wanda. At first he was like a sea-worthy ship, in a calm with no definite port in sight. But, in due course, from the one vital fact of his love for Wanda other facts materialised. To begin with he thought with diminishing bitterness of old Martin Leland. The man was old, and he loved his daughter. Rumours of a wild life fly incredibly high and far and fast. Such rumours of Red Reckless's doings had come to Leland's ears, and perhaps it was natural enough that Leland believed them. Shandon had always known his neighbour as a hard man but a just. He made up his mind not to quarrel with him, but instead to so change the tenor of his life that Martin Leland would notice and would approve. If in taking Wanda to her new home he closed her old one to her he would be hurting her. He saw clearly, there being little foolish conceit in the man's makeup, that he was not worthy. And he understood, though vaguely at first, that it must be his one object now to become as worthy as any man could be of her. And when the fifth day came and Ruf Ettinger rode to the Bar L-M with excitement dancing in his eyes and his tongue clacking, Shandon thought that he saw a beginning. Ruf Ettinger, a little dried up man of forty-five, was crabbed, cranky, sour and mean. He had the eyes, nose and brain of a fox, while perhaps the rest of him, heart and soul, came close to being just plain hog. He was stingy and suspicious, and people were no more in the habit of speaking well of him than they were of riding out of their way to stop at his place. He was the kind of man that makes his wife and children live in a miserable, two roomed shanty, while he builds a big, warm, expensive barn for his hay and horses. The only time he was ever credited with a human emotion was when his favourite dog died; he cried over it and then got drunk, careless of cost.