ome and stay with y'u a
while I reckon."

"Please send for her at once, then, and ask her to come to-day."

"All right. I'll send one of the boys right away."

"How did y'u leave 'Frisco, ma'am?" asked Mac, by way of including
himself easily.

"He's resting quietly. Unless blood-poisoning sets in they ought all to
do well."

"It's right lucky for them y'u happened along. This is the hawss corral,
ma'am," explained the young man just as Morgan opened his thin lips to
tell her.

Judd contrived to get rid of him promptly. "Slap on a saddle, Mac, and
run up the remuda so Miss Messiter can see the hawsses for herself," he
ordered.

"Mebbe she'd rather ride down and look at the bunch," suggested the
capable McWilliams.

As it chanced, she did prefer to ride down the pasture and look over
the place from on horseback. She was in love with her ranch already.
Its spacious distances, the thousands of cattle and the horses, these
picturesque retainers who served her even to the shedding of an enemy's
blood; they all struck an answering echo in her gallant young heart
that nothing in Kalamazoo had been able to stir. She bubbled over with
enthusiasm, the while Morgan covertly sneered and McWilliams warmed to
the untamed youth in her.

"What about this man Bannister?" she flung out suddenly, after they had
cantered back to the house when the remuda had been inspected.

Her abrupt question brought again the short, tense silence she had
become used to expect.

"He runs sheep about twenty or thirty miles southwest of here,"
explained McWilliams, in a carefully casual tone.

"So everybody tells me, but it seems to me he spills a good deal of lead
on my men," she answered impatiently. "What's the trouble?"

"Last week he crossed the dead-line with a bunch of five thousand
sheep."

"Who draws this dead-line?"

"The cattlemen got together and drew it. Your uncle was one of those
that marked it off, ma'am."

"And Bannister crossed it?"

"Yes, ma'am. Yesterday 'Frisco come on him and one of his herders with
a big bunch of them less than fifteen miles from here. He didn't know it
was Bannister, and took a pot-shot at him. 'Course Bannister came back
at him, and he got Frisco in the laig."

"Didn't know it was Bannister? What difference WOULD that make?" she
said impatiently.

Mac laughed. "What difference would it make, Judd?"

Morgan scowled, and the young man answered his own question. "We don't
any of us go out o