lling what had taken place. She would fight her own
battles.

"Well, he's a sure enough toughfoot," admitted the rancher.

"When did you know him?"

"We was ridin' together, a right long time ago."

"Where?"

"Up around Rawlins--thataway."

"He said he knew you in Brown's Park."

The man flashed a quick, uncertain look at his daughter. It appeared to
ask how much Houck had told. "I might 'a' knowed him there too. Come to
think of it, I did. Punchers drift around a heap. Say, how about dinner?
You got it started? I'm gettin' powerful hungry."

June knew the subject was closed. She might have pushed deeper into her
father's reticence, but some instinct shrank from what she might uncover.
There could be only pain in learning the secret he so carefully hid.

There had been no discussion of it between them, nor had it been
necessary to have any. It was tacitly understood that they would have
little traffic with their neighbors, that only at rare intervals would
Pete drive to Meeker, Glenwood Springs, or Bear Cat to dispose of furs he
had trapped and to buy supplies. The girl's thoughts and emotions were
the product largely of this isolation. She brooded over the mystery of
her father's past till it became an obsession in her life. To be brought
into close contact with dishonor makes one either unduly sensitive or
callously indifferent. Upon June it had the former effect.

The sense of inferiority was branded upon her. She had seen girls
giggling at the shapeless sacks she had stitched together for clothes
with which to dress herself. She was uncouth, awkward, a thin black thing
ugly as sin. It had never dawned on her that she possessed rare
potentialities of beauty, that there was coming a time when she would
bloom gloriously as a cactus in a sand waste.

After dinner June went down to the creek and followed a path along its
edge. She started up a buck lying in the grass and watched it go crashing
through the brush. It was a big-game country. The settlers lived largely
on venison during the fall and winter. She had killed dozens of
blacktail, an elk or two, and more than once a bear. With a rifle she was
a crack shot.

But to-day she was not hunting. She moved steadily along the winding
creek till she came to a bend in its course. Beyond this a fishing-rod
lay in the path. On a flat rock near it a boy was stretched, face up,
looking into the blue, unflecked sky.

CHAPTER III

PALS

He was a red-he