your time."

"I reckon I won't do that, Dad," she said, laughing at him fondly.

"I don't know. I reckon you've had too much responsibility on those
shoulders of yours. You left school too young, too. That's what these
other girls say. Why, that Boston girl is going to school now!

"But, shucks! she wouldn't know enough to hurt her if she attended
school from now till the end of time!"

Frances laughed again. "That is pretty harsh, father. Now, I think I
have had quite schooling enough to get along. I don't need the higher
branches of education to help you run this ranch. Do I?"

"By mighty!" exploded the Captain. "I don't know whether I have been
doing right by you or not. I've been talking to Mrs. Bill Edwards about
it. I loved you so, Frances, that I hated to have you out of my sight.
But----"

"Now, now!" cried the girl. "Let's have no more of that. You and I have
only each other, and I couldn't bear to be away from you long enough to
go to a boarding school."

"Yes--I know," went on Captain Rugley. "But there are ways of getting
around _that_. We'll see."

One thing he was determined on was Captain Dan Rugley. He proposed to
have "some doings" at the ranch-house before Pratt was well enough to be
discharged from "St. Frances' Hospital," as he called the
_hacienda_.

The old ranchman worked up the idea with Mrs. Edwards before Frances
knew anything about it.

"They call it a 'dinner dance,'" he confided to Frances at length, when
the main plan was already made. "At least that's what Mrs. Edwards
says."

"A 'dinner dance'?" repeated his daughter, not sure for the moment that
she wished to have so much confusion in the house when there was so much
to do.

"Yes! Now, it isn't one of those dances you read about out East, where
folks drink a cup of tea, and then get up and dance around, and then
take a sandwich and the orchestra strikes up another tune," chuckled
Captain Rugley.

"No, it isn't like that. I couldn't stand any such doings. I'd never
know when I'd had enough to eat; every dance would shake down the
courses so that my stomach would be packed as hard as a cement
sidewalk."

"Oh, Daddy!" said Frances, half laughing at him.

"No. This dinner dance idea is all right," declared the ranchman. "We
give a dinner to the whole crowd--all the girls and boys that have been
coming over here for the past two or three weeks."

"It will make fifteen at table," said the practical Frances, thinking
har