We tried 'em on my Mary. She's about your size. You're comin' down to our
house to supper to-night. I want you should get acquainted with the
girls."

June looked at Mollie, who nodded smilingly.

"I'll be terrible glad to come, ma'am," June said.

"Then that's settled. They're nice girls, if I do say it myself that am
their mother."

So June took her first timid steps into the social life of the frontier
town. Shyly she made friends, and with them went to church, to Sunday
School, and to picnics.

It had been definitely decided that she was to wait on table at the hotel
restaurant and not return with her father to Piceance Creek. The plan had
originated with Mollie, but Tolliver had acquiesced in it eagerly. If
June went home with him Houck might reappear on the horizon, but if she
stayed at Bear Cat, buttressed by the support of the town, the man from
Brown's Park would not dare to urge his claim again.

June waited on table at the hotel, but this did not keep her from the
dances that were held in the old army hospital building. There were no
class distinctions in Bear Cat then. There are not many now. No paupers
lived in the county. This still holds good. Except the owners of the big
cattle companies there were no men of wealth. A man was not judged by
what he had or by the kind of work he was doing. His neighbors looked
through externals to see what he was, stripped of all adventitious
circumstance. On that basis solely he was taken into fellowship or cast
out from it.

The girl from Piceance Creek worked hard and was content, even if not
quite happy. If she ever thought of the boy she had married, no reference
to him ever crossed her lips. She was known simply as June by the town.
Strangers called her Miss Tolliver.

There was about her a quiet self-possession that discouraged familiarity
on the part of ambitious and amorous cowboys. Her history, with its
thread of tragedy running through the warp and woof of it, set her apart
from other girls of her age. Still almost a child in years, she had been
caught in the cross-currents of life and beaten by its cold waves. Part
of the heritage of youth--its gay and adventurous longing for
experience--had been filched from her before she was old enough to know
its value. In time she would perhaps recover her self-esteem, but she
would never know in its fullness that divine right of American maidenhood
to rule its environment and make demands of it.

CHAPTER