“Y’u didn’t ask me my name,” he said, a dark flush sweeping his face. “I ask it now.” Like the light from a snuffed candle the boyish recklessness had gone out of his face. His jaws were set like a vise and he looked hard as hammered steel. “My name is Bannister,” he said, coldly. “Ned Bannister, the outlaw,” she let slip, and was aware of a strange sinking of the heart. It seemed to her that something sinister came to the surface in his handsome face. “I reckon we might as well let it go at that,” he returned, with bitter briefness. CHAPTER II. THE KING OF THE BIG HORN COUNTRY Two months before this time Helen Messiter had been serenely teaching a second grade at Kalamazoo, Michigan, notwithstanding the earnest efforts of several youths of that city to induce her to retire to domesticity “What’s the use of being a schoolmarm?” had been the burden of their plaint. “Any spinster can teach kids _C-a-t_, Cat, but only one in several thousand can be the prettiest bride in Kalamazoo.” None of them, however, had been able to drive the point sufficiently home, and it is probable that she would have continued to devote herself to Young America if an uncle she had never seen had not died without a will and left her a ranch in Wyoming yclept the Lazy D. When her lawyer proposed to put the ranch on the market Miss Helen had a word to say. “I think not. I’ll go out and see it first, anyhow,” she said. “But really, my dear young lady, it isn’t at all necessary. Fact is, I’ve already had an offer of a hundred thousand dollars for it. Now, I should judge that a fair price.” “Very likely,” his client interrupted, quietly. “But, you see, I don’t care to sell.” “Then what in the world are you going to do with it?” “Run it.” “But, my dear Miss Messiter, it isn’t an automobile or any other kind of toy. You must remember that it takes a business head and a great deal of experience to make such an investment pay. I really think—” “My school ends on the fourteenth of June. I’ll get a substitute for the last two months. I shall start for Wyoming on the eighteenth of April.” The man of law gasped, explained the difficulties again carefully as to a child, found that he was wasting his breath, and wisely gave it up. Miss Messiter had started on the eighteenth of April, as she had announced. When she reached Gimlet Butte, the nearest railroad point to the Lazy D, she found a group of curious, weatherbeaten individuals gathered round a machine foreign to their experience. It was on a flat car, and the general opinion ran the gamut from a newfangled sewing machine to a thresher. Into this guessing contest came its owner with so brisk and businesslike an energy that inside of two hours she was testing it up and down the wide street of Gimlet Butte, to the wonder and delight of an audience to which each one of the eleven saloons of the city had contributed its admiring quota.