of quick at suspicionin' everybody; but Jim and me have always got along
the best kind."

Again the Dean was silent, as though he had forgotten the man beside him
in his occupation with thoughts that he could not share.

When they had crossed the valley meadows and, climbing the hill on the
other side, could see the road for several miles ahead, the Dean pointed
to a black object on the next ridge.

"There's Jim's automobile now. They're headin' for Prescott, too.
Kitty's drivin', I reckon. I tell Stella that that machine and Kitty's
learnin' to run the thing is about all the returns that Jim can show for
the money he's spent in educatin' her. I don't mean," he added, with a
quick look at Patches, as though he feared to be misunderstood, "that
Kitty's one of them good-for-nothin' butterfly girls. She ain't that by
a good deal. Why, she was raised right here in this neighborhood, an' we
love her the same as if she was our own. She can cook a meal or make a
dress 'bout as well as her mother, an' does it, too; an' she can ride a
horse or throw a rope better'n some punchers I've seen, but--" The Dean
stopped, seemingly for want of words to express exactly his thought.

"It seems to me," offered Patches abstractedly, "that education, as we
call it, is a benefit only when it adds to one's life. If schooling or
culture, or whatever you choose to term it, is permitted to rob one of
the fundamental and essential elements of life, it is most certainly an
evil."

"That's the idea," exclaimed the Dean, with frank admiration for his
companion's ability to say that which he himself thought. "You say it
like a book. But that's it. It ain't the learnin' an' all the stuff that
Kitty got while she was at school that's worryin' us. It's what
she's likely to lose through gettin' 'em. This here modern,
down-to-the-minute, higher livin', loftier sphere, intellectual
supremacy idea is all right if folks'll just keep their feet on the
ground.

"You take Stella an' me now. I know we're old fashioned an' slow an' all
that, an' we've seen a lot of hardships since we was married over in
Skull Valley where she was born an' raised. She was just a girl then,
an' I was only a kid, punchin' steers for a livin'. I suppose we've seen
about as hard times as anybody. At least that's what they would be
called now. But, hell, _we_ didn't think nothin' of it then; we was
happy, sir, and we've been happy for over forty year. I tell you, sir,
we've lived