white, black, or red--on the
Bar-T acres. The Captain had married late in life, and had loved
Frances' mother devotedly. When she died suddenly the man could not bear
to hear or see another woman on the place.

Then Frances grew into his heart and life, and although the old wound
opened as the ranchman saw his daughter expand, her love and
companionship was like a healing balm poured into his sore heart.

The man's strong, fierce nature suddenly went out to his child and she
became all and all to him--just as her mother had been during the few
years she had been spared to him.

So the girl's schooling was cut short--and Frances loved books and the
training she had received at the Amarillo schools. She would have loved
to go on--to pass her examinations for college preparation, and finally
get her diploma and an A. B., at least, from some college.

That, however, was not to be. Old Captain Rugley lavished money on her
like rain, when she would let him. She used some of the money to buy
books and a piano and pay for a teacher for the latter to come to the
ranch, while she spent much midnight oil studying the books by herself.

Captain Rugley's health was not all it should have been. Frances could
not now leave him for long.

Until recently the old ranchman had borne lightly his seventy years. But
rheumatism had taken hold upon him and he did not stand as straight as
of old, nor ride so well.

He was far from an invalid; but Frances realized--more than he did,
perhaps--that he had finished his scriptural span of life, and that his
present years were borrowed from that hardest of taskmasters, Father
Time.

Often it was Frances who rode the ranges, instead of Captain Rugley,
viewing the different herds, receiving the reports of underforemen and
wranglers, settling disputes between the punchers themselves, looking
over chuck outfits, buying hay, overseeing brandings, and helping cut
out fat steers for the market trail.

There was nothing Frances of the ranges did not know about the
cattle-raising business. And she was giving some attention to the new
grain-raising ideas that had come into the Panhandle with the return of
the first-beaten farming horde.

For the Texas Panhandle has had its two farming booms. The first advance
of the farmers into the ranges twenty-five years or more before had been
a rank failure.

"They came here and plowed up little spots in our parsters that air
eyesores now," one old cowman sa