time. Maybe you've got something to
thank that Pete for."

"And Ratty M'Gill?" asked Pratt, smiling.

"Poor Ratty!" said Frances again.

"He's gone down to the Pecos country," said the Captain, briskly. "Best
place for him. Maybe he will know enough not to get in with such fellows
as that Pete again."

"I should have been much afraid had I known what Pratt was getting into
out here," Mrs. Sanderson ventured.

"Now, now, Sister! Don't try to make a mollycoddle out o' the boy," said
Jonas P. Lonergan. "I tell you we're going to make a man out o' Pratt
here. I've bought an interest in the Bar-T for him. He's going to take
some of the work off the Captain's shoulders when we get him broke in,
hey, Dan?"

"Right you are, Lon!" agreed the other old man.

Frances smiled quietly to hear them plan. She put her needle in and out
of the work she was doing slowly. By and by her fingers stopped
altogether and she looked away across the ranges.

She, too, was planning. She was seeing herself living in a college town
the next winter, with daddy for company, while Mr. Lonergan and Pratt
and his mother remained on at the Bar-T.

She saw herself graduating after a few years from some advanced school,
quite the equal of Pratt in education. Meanwhile he would be learning to
change the vast Bar-T ranges into wheat and milo fields, and taking up
the new farming that is revolutionizing the Panhandle.

And after that--and after that----?

"How about Ming bringing us a pitcher of nice cool lemonade, eh,
Frances?" said the Captain, breaking in upon her day-dream.

"All right, Daddy. I'll tell him," said Frances of the Ranges.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's Frances of the Ranges, by Amy Bell Marlowe

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