reditary, and I can't help it."

"Sir Eustace Chetwood!" gasped Mr. McGinity. "Good Lord!"

"Well, I'm not using either title at present," Chetwood grinned. "Just
keep it dark, like a good fellow. I don't want to be plagued by a lot of
blighters who can't see me at all as a thirty-dollar ranch hand. My real
friends are just beginning to call me 'Bill'--and I like it. I say, Mr.
McGinity, if you should ever call me 'Bill,' I'd call you 'Mac'."

"Is that so, Bill?" said Mr. McGinity, who was a gentlemen of easy
adjustments.

"It are so, Mac!" Chetwood laughed. "See you later about that
proposition. Remember, you are to play fair."

CHAPTER XXXII

CHETWOOD UNMASKED

As Angus drove homeward he was at first unable to adjust himself to
actuality. He had given up all hope of retaining the ranch. The wrench
of loss had been over. But now the ranch was his again, subject to the
debt already existing, to keep if he chose.

But he realized that it would be folly to retain it as a ranch, to
refuse a proposition which McGinity had just made amounting to a
fifty-fifty partnership with the Airline in the project of a townsite.
Again, no matter what his individual preference, he must think of
others. In reality, his own individual interest in the ranch amounted to
but one-third. Sooner or later there must be a division--an adjustment
of shares between Jean, Turkey and himself. In justice to them he could
not refuse an offer which promised more than he could ever hope to make
or receive for the ranch as a ranch.

And so the ranch, as a ranch, was done. Its broad fields and pastures
and broad stretches of timbered levels would be broken up, surveyed into
building lots, pegged out with stakes, gridironed with embryonic
streets. For a while it would lie raw, unsightly, ruined as a ranch,
unmade as a town. And then people would come in. Shacks would spring up,
stores with false fronts, all sorts of makeshifts which accompany
construction days. Later would come permanence, better buildings,
churches, schools, gardens, sidewalks. Where the Ranch had been would
stand the Town. It was Progress, the history of the West since the first
steel road adventured among the ancient buffalo trails. The old order
was changing, but he, though young, was more of the old order than the
new, because he had been bred in the former.

Faith touched his arm lightly.

"Tell me I'm awake. It seems like a dream."

He put his arm around her and