many wounded men brought into field-hospitals
not to realize how easy it is to lose a blouse.

Recovering from the bullet-wound and unable to tell anything about
himself, he had apparently passed under the name of Robert Green. Stratton
wondered with a touch of grim amusement whether this christening was not
the result of doughboy humor. He must have been green enough, in all
conscience.

He was not even grimly amused by the ultimate discovery that the name of
Roth Stratton had appeared months and months ago on one of the official
lists of "killed or missing." It increased his discomfort over the whole
hateful business and made him thankful for the first time that he was
alone in the world. At least no mother or sister had been tortured by this
strange prank of fate.

But at last the miles of red tape had been untied or cut, and the moment
his discharge came Stratton took the first possible train out of New York.
He did not even wire Bloss, his ranch-foreman, that he was coming. As a
matter of fact he felt that doing so would only further complicate an
already sufficiently difficult situation.

The Shoe-Bar outfit, in western Arizona, had been his property barely a
week before he left it for the recruiting-office. Born and bred in the
Texas Panhandle, he inherited his father's ranch when barely twenty-one.
Even then many of the big outfits were being cut up into farms, public
range-land had virtually ceased to exist, and one by one the cattlemen
were driven westward before the slowly encroaching wave of civilization.

Two years later Stratton decided to give up the fight and follow them.
During the winter before the war he sold out for a handsome figure, spent
several months looking over new ground, and finally located and bought the
Shoe-Bar outfit.

The deal was hurried through because of his determination to enlist.
Indeed, he would probably not have purchased at all had not the new
outfit, even to his hasty inspection, seemed to be so unusual a bargain
and so exactly what he wanted. But buy he did, placed Joe Bloss, a
reliable and experienced cattleman who had been with him for years, in
charge, and departed.

From that moment he had never once set eyes on the Shoe-Bar. Bloss wrote
frequent and painstaking reports which seemed to indicate that everything
was going well. But all through the long and tedious journey ending at the
little Arizona way-station, Stratton fumed and fretted and wondered. Even
if Joe