Willie Dart's sunny nature seemed to grow ever brighter as the days wore on. Once or twice he sighed at Wayne Shandon's failure to respond to his levities; and when he felt particularly unappreciated he carried his dimpling personality to the bunk house where he was hailed with delight. When a flask that had come in with Long Steve, who had made a brief trip to the outer world, disappeared before that joyous gentleman had consumed half of the potent contents, and when later the empty flask was found in the covers of Emmet's bunk, Willie Dart looked on with sorrowful, innocent eyes while Steve and Emmet resorted to physical argument. When a game of crib was being played while half a dozen men looked on, and a portion of the deck vanished, only to turn up ten minutes later in the hip pocket of Tony Harris, who had not once been near the table and was most thoroughly mystified, no one thought of blaming the cheerful Mr. Dart. It was only when he offered privately to collect for Big Bill a debt of six bits long owing to him from Dave Platt that the real gift of those wonderful hands of his began to be at all apparent. Then, too, the method of his progress over the range was another source of unfailing delight and unbounded admiration. He had ridden a horse to the Bar L-M, but no man of them ever saw his little legs astride a horse again. He found, back of the blacksmith shop, the wreck of an old cart which years ago had been used for breaking colts; he improvised shafts and seat; he discovered the encouraging fact that Old Bots, a shambling derelict who had lost an eye when Wayne Shandon was quite young, was gentle and trustworthy. After that, wherever he went abroad, and he travelled all over the countryside, he rode in the cart, steering Old Bots this way and that with much shouting, prodding and jerking of reins. And he drove where perhaps no man had ever driven before. His smiling confidence in Old Bots, in his rattling, creaking old cart, in his own ability as a driver were all characteristic of his joyous optimism. In the meantime Wayne Shandon had at last seen Wanda. His reasons for making no effort to see her immediately after his heated interview with Martin Leland were clear in his own mind; he expected to find that they had been equally as clear to her, and that she would have understood. But the Wanda he found one riotously brilliant morning was rather cool, distant, unapproachable.