hat I am happier without."

"And that is what you have done for me, dear girl," he said in a low tone
as he pressed her hand. The next moment, with a nonchalant "So-long," the
parting of the plains, he had dug the spurs into his horse and ridden
away.

For a minute the girl sat looking after this one link between her desolate
existence and the luxury and society he still represented in her eyes.

"His manners have changed for the worse," she thought, recalling his
abrupt departure, "but I think he has changed for the better."

Which remark proves that her sense of relative masculine values was still
sound.

Larkin continued on directly south-east for twenty miles, until he crossed
the Big Horn at what is now the town of Kirby. Thence his course lay south
rather than east until he should raise the white dust of his first flock.

With regard to his sheep, Larkin, in all disputed cases, took the advice
of his chief herder, Hard-winter Sims, the laziest man on the range, and
yet one who seemed to divine the numbed sheep intelligence in a manner
little short of marvelous.

Sims he had picked up in Montana, when that individual, unable to perform
the arduous duties of a cowboy, had applied for a job as a
sheep-herder--not so much because he liked the sheep, but because he had
to eat and clothe himself. By one of those rare accidents of luck Sims at
last found his _metier_, and Larkin the prince of sheepmen.

When Bud had determined to "walk" ten thousand animals north, Sims had
accompanied him to help in the buying, and was now superintending the long
drive.

On his advice the drive had been divided into five herds of two thousand,
he contending that it was dangerous, as well as injurious to the sheep, to
keep more than that number together. The others were following at
intervals of a few days. Larkin had left the leaders just north of the
hills that formed the hooked southern end of the Big Horn Mountains, and
expected that in two days' time they would have come north almost to the
junction of Kirby Creek and the Big Horn, near where it was calculated to
cross them.

After grazing his horse for an hour at noon, and taking a bite to eat
himself, Larkin pushed on, and, in a short time, made out a faint, whitish
mist rising against the horizon of hills. It was the dust of his leaders.
Presently, in the far distance, a man appeared on horseback making toward
him, and Bud wondered if anything had happened.

His fears