ride anything your Sage Brush grows that
you call a saddle-horse," she declared, with pretty daring. "Why, 'I was
the pride of the countryside' back in a country where fine horses grew.
Really and seriously, it was Cousin Gene who was afraid of spirited
horses, and he looked so splendid on them, too. But he couldn't manage
them any more than he could run an automobile over the bluff road above
the big cut this side of the third crossing of the Winnowoc. He
preferred to crawl through that cut in the slow old local train while I
climbed over the bluffs in our big car. You hadn't figured on my
boasting qualities, had you?" she added, with a smile at her own
vaunting words.

"Oh, go on," Laura urged. "I heard your father telling us once that your
cousin, on the Darby side, would ride out with you bravely enough, but
that you traded horses when you got off the place and you always came
back home on the one they were afraid for you to take out and your
cousin was afraid to ride back."

"She _climbed_ while Cousin Gene _crawled_. I believe she said something
there, but she doesn't know it yet; and it's not my business to tell her
till she asks me." York shut his lips grimly at the unspoken words.
"We'll be back, appetite and sundries, for the best meal the
scullery-maid can loot from the village," he said, as they rose from the
table.

When Jerry came out of the side door, where York was waiting for her,
she suggested at once a model for a cover illustration of an outing
magazine, an artistic advertisement for well-tailored results, and a
type of young American beauty. As they rode back toward the barns and
cattle-sheds that belonged to the ranch edging the corporation limits of
New Eden, neither one noticed the tall, angular form of Mrs. Stellar
Bahrr as she came striding across lots toward the driveway.

Stellar lived in a side street. Her back yard bordered a vacant lot on
the next side street above her. Crossing this, she could slip over the
lawn of a vacant house and down the alley half a block, and on by the
United Brethren minister's parsonage. That let her sidle between a
little carpenter-shop and a shoe-shop to the rear gateway into an alley
that led out to the open ground at the foot of the Macpherson knoll.
Stellar preferred this corkscrew route to the "Castle." It gave her
several back and side views, with "listening-posts" at certain points.

"Oh, good morning, Laury! I'm so glad to find you alone. I'm in a l