be round with an
invite to the wedding."

"That is, if you are."

"If I am--yes. Y'u can't most always tell when they have eyes like
hers."

"You're quite an authority on the sex considering your years."

"Yes, ma'am." He looked aggrieved, thinking himself a man grown. "How
did y'u say Mr. Bannister was?"

"Wait, and I'll send Nora out to tell you," she flashed, and disappeared
in the house.

Conversation at the bunkhouse and the chucktent sometimes circled
around the young women at the house, but its personality rarely grew
pronounced. References to Helen Messiter and the housemaid were usually
by way of repartee at each other. For a change had come over the spirit
of the Lazy D men, and, though a cheerful profanity still flowed freely
when they were alone together, vulgarity was largely banished.

The morning after his conversation with Miss Messiter, McWilliams
was washing in the foreman's room when the triangle beat the call for
breakfast, and he heard the cook's raucous "Come and get it." There was
the usual stampede for the tent, and a minute later Mac flung back the
flap and entered. He took the seat at the head of the table, along the
benches on both sides of which the punchers were plying busy knives and
forks.

"A stack of chips," ordered the foreman; and the cook's "Coming up" was
scarcely more prompt than the plate of hot cakes he set before the young
man.

"Hen fruit, sunny side up," shouted Reddy, who was further advanced in
his meal.

"Tame that fog-horn, son," advised Wun Hop; but presently he slid three
fried eggs from a frying-pan into the plate of the hungry one.

"I want y'u boys to finish flankin' that bunch of hill calves to-day,"
said the foreman, emptying half a jug of syrup over his cakes.

"Redtop, he ain't got no appetite these days," grinned Denver, as the
gentleman mentioned cleaned up a second loaded plate of ham, eggs and
fried potatoes. "I see him studying a Wind River Bible* yesterday.
Curious how in the spring a young man's fancy gits to wandering on house
furnishing. Red, he was taking the catalogue alphabetically. Carpets was
absorbin' his attention, chairs on deck, and chandeliers in the hole, as
we used to say when we was baseball kids."

[* A Wind River Bible in the Northwest ranch country is a
catalogue of one of the big Chicago department stores that
does a large shipping business in the West.]

"Ain't a word of truth in it," indignantly denied t