k to his wife in this country, specially if she's new to
it and not broke," said Smith; "and if I had one, ma'am, I'd _stick_ to
her."

Smith looked at her as he said this, with conviction and deep
earnestness in his eyes.

"I'm sure you would," she agreed.

"And I'd be kind to her," he declared.

"There's no need to tell me that," she assured him. "You're kind to
everybody."

"And if she didn't like the name," Smith went on significantly, "I'd
have it changed!"

"I'm sure she'd like it--she'd be very ungrateful if she didn't," Agnes
replied, somewhat amused by his earnestness, but afraid to show it. "I'm
going to order lumber for my house in a day or two."

Smith switched from sentiment to business in a flash.

"Let me sell you the nails," he requested. "I can give 'em to you as
cheap as you can git 'em in Meander."

CHAPTER XIV

"LIKE A WOLF"

Agnes had been on her homestead almost a week. She was making a brave
"stagger," as Smith described all amateurish efforts, toward cutting up
some dry cottonwood limbs into stove-lengths before her tent on the
afternoon that Jerry Boyle rode across the ford.

While she had not forgotten him, she had begun to hope that he had gone
back to Comanche, and his sudden appearance there gave her an unpleasant
shock. He drew up near her with a friendly word, and dismounted with a
cowboy swing to his long body and legs.

"Well, Agnes, you dodged me in Meander," said he. "You've located quite
a piece up the river and off the stage-road, haven't you?"

"But not far enough, it seems," she answered, a little weariness in her
voice, as of one who turns unwillingly to face at last something which
has been put away for an evil day.

"No need for us to take up old quarrels, Agnes," he chided with a show
of gentleness.

"I don't want to quarrel with you, Jerry; I never did quarrel with you,"
she disclaimed.

"'Misunderstandings' would be a better word then, I suppose," he
corrected. "But you could have knocked me over with a feather when you
repudiated me over there at Comanche that day. I suppose I should have
known that you were under an alias before I made that break, but I
didn't know it, Agnes, believe _me_."

"How could you?" she said, irritably. "That was nothing; let it rest.
But you understand that it was for the sake of others that the alias
was--and is--used; not for my own."

"Of course, Agnes. But what do you want to be wasting yourself on this
rough