"Oh, I have my annual, Mr. Bucks!" Marion opened her bag to find it. Bucks held out his hand. "Let me see it a moment." He adjusted his eye-glasses, looked at the pass, and called for a pen; Bucks had never lost his gracious way of doing very little things. He laid the card on the table and wrote across the back of it over his name: "Good on all passenger trains." When he handed the card back to Marion he turned to Dicksie. "I understand you are laying out two or three towns on the ranch, Mrs. McCloud?" "Two or three! Oh, no, only one as yet, Mr. Bucks! They are laying out, oh, such a pretty town! Cousin Lance is superintending the street work--and whom do you think I am going to name it after? You! I think 'Bucks' makes a dandy name for a town, don't you? And I am going to have one town named Dunning; there will be two stations on the ranch, you know, and I think, really, there _ought_ to be three." "As many as that?" "I don't believe you can operate a line that long, Mr. Bucks, with stations fourteen miles apart." Bucks opened his eyes in benevolent surprise. Dicksie, unabashed, kept right on: "Well, do you know how traffic is increasing over there, with the trains running only two months now? Why, the settlers are fairly pouring into the country." "Will you give me a corner lot if we put another station on the ranch?" "I will give you two if you will give us excursions and run some of the Overland passenger trains through the valley." Bucks threw back his head and laughed in his tremendous way. "I don't know about that; I daren't promise offhand, Mrs. McCloud. But if you can get Whispering Smith to come back you might lay the matter before him. He is to take charge of all the colonist business when he returns; he promised to do that before he went away for his vacation. Whispering Smith is really the man you will have to stand in with." * * * * * Whispering Smith, lying on his iron bed in the hospital, professed not to be able quite to understand why they had made such a fuss about it. He underwent the excitement of the appearance of Barnhardt and the first talk with McCloud and Dicksie with hardly a rise in his temperature, and, lying in the sunshine of the afternoon, he was waiting for Marion. When she opened the door his face was turned wistfully toward it. He held out his hands with the old smile. She ran half blinded across the room and dropped on her knee beside him. "My dear Marion, why did they drag you away out here?" "They did not drag me away out here. Did you expect me to sit with folded hands when I heard you were ill anywhere in the wide world?" He looked hungrily at her. "I didn't suppose any one in the wide world would take it very seriously." "Mr. McCloud is crushed this afternoon to think you have said you would not go back with him. You would not believe how he misses you."