.

The treatment the range girl gave him was rather rough, but extremely
efficacious. She dashed half the contents of the bottle into his face,
and he sat up, gasping and choking. She tore away his tattered shirt in
a most matter-of-fact manner and began to bathe the scratches on his
chest with her kerchief (quickly unknotted from around her throat),
which she had saturated with water. Fortunately, the wounds were not
very deep, after all.

"You--you must think me a silly sort of chap," he gasped. "Foolish to
keel over like this----"

"You haven't been used to seeing blood," the girl observed. "That makes
a difference. I've been binding up the boys' cuts and bruises all my
life. Never was such a place as the old Bar-T for folks getting hurt."

"Bar-T?" ejaculated the young man, with sudden interest. "Then you must
be Miss Rugley, Captain Dan Rugley's daughter?"

"Yes, sir," said the girl, quietly. "Captain Rugley is my father."

"And you're going to put on that very clever spectacle at the Jackleg
schoolhouse next month? I've heard all about it--and what you have done
toward making it what Bill Edwards calls a howling success. I'm stopping
with Bill. Mrs. Edwards is my mother's friend, and I'm the advance guard
of a lot of Amarillo people who are coming out to the Edwardses just to
see your 'Pageant of the Panhandle.' Bill and his wife are no end
enthusiastic about it."

The deeper color had gradually faded out of the girl's cheeks. She was
cool enough now; but she kept her eyes lowered, just the same. He would
have liked to see their expression once more. There had been a startled
look in their grey depths when first she glanced at him.

"I am afraid they make too much of my part in the affair," said she,
quietly. "I am only one of the committee----"

"But they say you wrote it all," the young fellow interposed, eagerly.

"Oh--_that_! It happened to be easy for me to do so. I have always
been deeply interested in the Panhandle--'The Great American Desert' as
the old geographies used to call all this great Middle West, of Kansas,
Nebraska, the Indian Territory, and Upper Texas.

"My father crossed it among the first white men from the Eastern States.
He came back here to settle--long before I was born, of course--when a
plow had never been sunk in these range lands. He belongs to the old
cattle regime. He wouldn't hear until lately of putting wheat into any
of the Bar-T acres."

"Ah, well, by all accounts