"Oh, Thaine, you are as good as--as alfalfa hay, and I need you more today than I ever did in my life before." "And I want to help you more than anything. Don't be a still cat, Leighlie. Tell me what you are up to." They had reached the steep hill beyond the Jacobs sheep range where the narrow road with what John Jacobs called "the scary little twist" wound down between high banks to a shadowy hollow leading out to the open trail by the willows along Big Wolf. At the break in the bank, opening a rough way down to the deep waters of Little Wolf, a draught of cool air swept up refreshingly against their faces. Thaine flattened the buggy top under the shade of overhanging trees and held the horse to the spot to enjoy the delightful coolness. They had no such eerie picture to prejudice them against the place as the picture that haunted John Jacobs' mind here. "I've bought a ranch, Thaine; the quarter section that Uncle Jim entered in 1870," Leigh said calmly. "Alice Leigh Shirley, are you crazy?" Thaine exclaimed. "No, I'm safe and sane. But that's why I need your advice," Leigh answered. Something in the girl's appealing voice and perfect confidence of friendship, so unlike Jo Bennington's pouting demands and pretty coquetry, came as a revelation and a sense of loss to Thaine. For he loved Jo. He was sure of that, cock-sure. "It's this way," Leigh went on, "you know how Uncle Jim lost everything in the boom except his honor. He's helped everybody who needed help, and everybody likes him, I guess." "I never knew anybody who didn't," Thaine agreed. "So many things, I needn't name them all, bad crops, bad faith on the part of others, bad luck and bad judgment and bad health, for all his size, have helped till he is ready to go hopeless, and Uncle Jim's only fifty-one. It's no time to quit till you're eighty in such a good old state as Kansas," Leigh asserted. "Only, big as he is, he's not a real strong man, and crumples down where small nervy men stand up." "Well, lady landlord, how can I advise you? You are past advising. You have already bought," Thaine said. "You can tell me how to pay for the ranch," Leigh declared calmly. "I bought of Darley Champers for sixteen hundred dollars. I paid two hundred down just now. I've been saving it two years; since I left the high school at Careyville. Butter and eggs and chickens and some other things." She hesitated, and a dainty pink tint swept her cheek. Why should a girl be so deliciously fair with the bloom of summer on her cheeks and with little ringlets curling in baby-gold hair about her temples and at her neck, and with such red lips sweet to kiss, and then put about herself a faint invisible something that should make the young man beside her blush that he would even think of being so rude as to try to kiss her. "And you paid how much?" Thaine asked gravely.