who
entered. The rough shirt-sleeved ranchman had developed, during the last
four months, into an equally blunt but soberly dressed proprietor. His
keen energetic face, however, wore an expression of embarrassment and
anxiety, with an added suggestion of a half humorous appreciation of it.

"I wouldn't have disturbed you, Mrs. Merrydew," he said, with a gentle
bluntness, "if I hadn't wanted to ask your advice before I saw Reddy.
I'm keeping out of his way until I could see you. I left Nelly and her
mother in 'Frisco. There's been some queer goings-on on the steamer
coming home; Kelly has sprang a new game on her mother, and--and suthin'
that looks as if there might be a new deal. However," here a sense that
he was, perhaps, treating his statement too seriously, stopped him, and
he smiled reassuringly, "that is as may be."

"I don't know," he went on, "as I ever told you anything about my Kelly
and Reddy,--partik'lerly about Kelly. She's a good girl, a square girl,
but she's got some all-fired romantic ideas in her head. Mebbee it kem
from her reading, mebbee it kem from her not knowing other girls, or
seeing too much of a queer sort of men; but she got an interest in the
bad ones, and thought it was her mission to reform them,--reform them
by pure kindness, attentive little sisterly ways, and moral example. She
first tried her hand on Reddy. When he first kem to us he was--well, he
was a blazin' ruin! She took him in hand, yanked him outer himself, put
his foot on the bedrock, and made him what you see him now. Well--what
happened; why, he got reg'larly soft on her; wanted to MARRY HER, and
I agreed conditionally, of course, to keep him up to the mark. Did you
speak?"

"No," said the lady, with her bright eyes fixed upon him.

"Well, that was all well and good, and I'd liked to have carried out my
part of the contract, and was willing, and am still. But you see, Kelly,
after she'd landed Reddy on firm ground, got a little tired, I reckon,
gal-like, of the thing she'd worked so easily, and when she went East
she looked around for some other wreck to try her hand on, and she found
it on the steamer coming back. And who do you think it was? Why, our
friend Louis Sylvester!"

Mrs. Merrydew smiled slightly, with her bright eyes still on the
speaker.

"Well, you know he IS fast at times--if he is a friend of mine--and she
reg'larly tackled him; and as my old woman says, it was a sight to see
her go for him. But then HE