hard and fast," she
said.

"It would cut you down to the bone," supplemented Brent Palmer.

She untwisted the strip, and stood looking at it, her eyes wide.

"I--I don't know why--" she faltered. "The thought makes me a little
sick. Why, isn't it queer? Ugh! it's like a snake!" She flung it
from her energetically and turned toward the ranch house.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ESTRELLA

The honeymoon developed and the necessary adjustments took place. The
latter Senor Johnson had not foreseen; and yet, when the necessity for
them arose, he acknowledged them right and proper.

"Course she don't want to ride over to Circle I with us," he informed
his confidant, Jed Parker. "It's a long ride, and she ain't used to
riding yet. Trouble is I've been thinking of doing things with her
just as if she was a man. Women are different. They likes different
things."

This second idea gradually overlaid the first in Senor Johnson's mind.
Estrella showed little aptitude or interest in the rougher side of
life. Her husband's statement as to her being still unused to riding
was distinctly a euphemism. Estrella never arrived at the point of
feeling safe on a horse. In time she gave up trying, and the sorrel
drifted back to cow-punching. The range work she never understood.

As a spectacle it imposed itself on her interest for a week; but since
she could discover no real and vital concern in the welfare of cows,
soon the mere outward show became an old story. Estrella's sleek
nature avoided instinctively all that interfered with bodily
well-being. When she was cool and well-fed and not thirsty, and
surrounded by a proper degree of feminine daintiness, then she was
ready to amuse herself. But she could not understand the desirability
of those pleasures for which a certain price in discomfort must be
paid. As for firearms, she confessed herself frankly afraid of them.
That was the point at which her intimacy with them stopped.

The natural level to which these waters fell is easily seen. Quite
simply, the Senor found that a wife does not enter fully into her
husband's workaday life. The dreams he had dreamed did not come true.

This was at first a disappointment to him, of course, but the
disappointment did not last. Senor Johnson was a man of sense, and he
easily modified his first scheme of married life.

"She'd get sick of it, and I'd get sick of it," he formulated his new
philosophy. "Now I got something to co