fore he knows
where he's at."

Billie mounted three steps and halted, her head held high.

"Him?" she queried with infinite scorn. "I don't want him! Dad asked
him to look out for me, you see, and he thinks I'm kind of on his
hands, but I'll show him! I'm liable to make some big mistakes, and I
reckon that Mrs. Halstead will earn all the money my grandfather left
her to teach me the rules of the game, but I'll sit tight and learn if
it breaks me and when it comes my turn to play, I'll show them all I'm
not a piker, anyway!"

"You wasn't ever that, Billie," the older woman observed gently, for
the girl's hurt heart was on her sleeve. "I reckon he only meant to be
kind."

"I don't want kindness!" the ungrateful Billie responded savagely. "I
don't want condescension and duty-friendship. I want, I want--oh, I
want Dad!"

Limasito was indeed out in full force to speed her on her way the
following morning. The news had traveled quickly over the countryside
and every style of conveyance, from a mule-team to the latest improved
jitney, lined the plaza. White, Mex', and Mongolian, from the richest
oil operator to the lowliest peon, her friends had gathered to say
farewell.

They stampeded her on the Calle Rivera and unceremoniously held up Mr.
North's impressive car before the hotel, while Jim Baggott, in an
ancient silk hat and bibulously primed for the occasion, read an
ungrammatical but fervent valediction.

Billie could only throw both hands out to them, laughing and sobbing in
one breath as the car moved off down a lane of solidly packed humanity
and disappeared in a whirl of dust.

"'S on the house!" Jim Baggott waved toward the bar with one hand and
openly wiped his eyes with the other. "Gonna make a gosh-almighty
swell of her, are they? Well, I wish'm luck, but they'll never change
her heart or break her spirit. She's our'n, an' she'll come back if I
have to go after her myself, so help me! What you-all have?"

True to his word, Kearn Thode had ridden out at daybreak and ridden
hard, but only the pinto knew where they were going and he was too
jaded to care. A sleepless night of bewilderment and self-disgust at
his own surly, unaccountable mood had brought a revelation that stunned
and humbled him.

He loved her! In a blinding flash of realization, he saw that from the
moment of their first meeting she had possessed him, body and soul. It
was that which had stirred his resentment to berserk