under cultivation; how with the inpouring of
the new population had come new blood, new methods, good roads, the
telephone, the rural mail route, and other civilizing agencies.

The young man groaned. "I know," he mourned. "I've lost my birth-land;
it's as extinct as the prehistoric lizards whose bones we used to find
sticking in the old gully banks on Table Mesa. By the way, that reminds
me: are there any of those giant fossils left? I was telling Professor
Anners about them the other day, and he was immensely interested."

"We're all fossils--we older folks of the cattle-raising times," laughed
the man whom Richard Gantry had called the "biggest man in the State."
"But there are some of the petrified bones left, too, I reckon. If the
professor is a friend of yours, we'll get him a State permit to dig all
he wants to."

"Yes; Professor Anners is a friend of mine," was the younger Blount's
half-absent rejoinder. But after the admission was made he qualified it.
"Perhaps I ought to say that he is as much a friend as his daughter will
permit him to be."

The qualifying clause was not thrown away upon the senator.

"What-all has the daughter got against you, son?" he asked mildly.

"Nothing very serious," said Patricia's lover, with a laugh which was
little better than a grimace. "It's merely that she is jealous of any
one who tries to share her father with her. Next to her career--"

"That's Boston, isn't it?" interrupted the ex-king of the cattle ranges.
Then he added: "I'm right glad it hasn't come in your way to tie
yourself up to one of those 'careers,' Evan, boy."

Now all the influences of this red-letter day had been humanizing, and
when Evan Blount remembered the preservation of the old "Circle-Bar"
ranch-house, and the motive which had prompted it, he told his brief
love-tale, hiding nothing--not even the hope that in the years to come
Patricia might possibly find her career sufficiently unsatisfying to
admit the thin edge of some wedge of reconsideration. He felt better
after he had told his father. It was highly necessary that he should
tell some one; and who better?

David Blount listened with the far-away look in his eyes which the son
had more than once marked as the greatest of the changes chargeable to
the aging years.

"Think a heap of her, do you, son?" he said, when the ambling
saddle-animals had covered another half-mile of the homeward journey.

"So much that it went near to spoiling me w