l on the range, that she had not gone to
Crawfordsville, where her father had a house, where he owned the
electric-lighting plant, the water system, and a general merchandise
store, and where both father and daughter spent many weeks each year.

The range-house, although but a few hundred yards distant from the
bunk-house, might as well have been in the next county. News from it
seldom filtered to the men's sleeping-quarters. The foreman, Brayley
now, Bat Truxton before him, reported frequently to Mr. Crawford at
his office in the big building, took orders from him there, advised
with him. The other men went there only when they were sent for, and
that was not more than half a dozen times yearly, when that many.

Conniston knew that Hapgood had stayed with the Crawfords two or three
days, resting up, as he overheard Brayley say with a fine scorn, and
that then he had gone on into Crawfordsville. Conniston supposed that
by now he had borrowed money and, if not again in New York, was on his
way thither. Of all else of the doings in the big house he was as
ignorant as though he had never crossed the desert lands between the
Half Moon and Indian Creek.

Conniston most of all men working for Mr. Crawford felt that he could
not go to the house. He had come to these people as an equal, as one
of their own station in life, even from a plane a bit higher than
theirs. When he had gone to work he had not thought that he was to be
put upon the same footing as every ignorant laborer who drew his pay
from the owner of the Half Moon. He had thought that it would be a
lark, that he would come to the house and laugh with the girl over his
days of rubbing elbows with thirty-dollar-a-month men. That he would
be, in a way, a guest.

Now it was evident that they had forgotten him, that if they thought
of Conniston it was merely to remember that he was one of the common
outfit. And Conniston's pride told him that if they chose to ignore
him, to look down upon him, to shut him out of their world socially,
he could do equally as well without them. Which was all very well, but
which did not in the least hinder him from dreaming dreams inhabited
solely by a slender, lithe, graceful girl with big gray eyes like dawn
skies in springtime.

The two weeks had not been wasted. He had learned something, and he
had made a friend. The friend was Lonesome Pete. Night after night,
with a dogged perseverance which neither towering barriers in the way