ndent airs, her
attitude seemed to say.

"Did you take the job?" Taterleg inquired.

"I didn't ask her about it."

"You didn't ask her? Well, what in the name of snakes did you come up
here for?"

The Duke led his horse away from the gate, back where she could not see
him, and stood fiddling with his cinch a bit, although it required no
attention at all.

"I got to thinkin' maybe I'd better go on west a piece. If you want to
stay, don't let me lead you off. Go on over and strike her for a job;
she needs men, I know, by the way she looked."

"No, I guess I'll go on with you till our roads fork. But I was kind of
thinkin' I'd like to stay around Glendora a while." Taterleg sighed as
he seemed to relinquish the thought of it, tried the gate to see that it
was latched, turned his horse about. "Well, where're we headin' for
now?"

"I want to ride up there on that bench in front of the house and look
around a little at the view; then I guess we'll go back to town."

They rode to the top of the bench the Duke indicated, where the view
broadened in every direction, that being the last barrier between the
river and the distant hills. The ranchhouse appeared big even in that
setting of immensities, and perilously near the edge of the crumbling
bluff which presented a face almost sheer on the river more than three
hundred feet below.

"It must 'a' been a job to haul the lumber for that house up here."

That was Taterleg's only comment. The rugged grandeur of nature
presented to him only its obstacles; its beauties did not move him any
more than they would have affected a cow.

The Duke did not seem to hear him. He was stretching his gaze into the
dim south up the river, where leaden hills rolled billow upon billow,
engarnitured with their sad gray sage. Whatever his thoughts were, they
bound him in a spell which the creaking of Taterleg's saddle, as he
shifted in it impatiently, did not disturb.

"Couple of fellers just rode up to the gate in the cross-fence back of
the bunkhouse," Taterleg reported.

The Duke grunted, to let it be known that he heard, but was not
interested. He was a thousand miles away from the Bad Lands in his
fast-running dreams.

"That old nigger seems to be havin' some trouble with them fellers,"
came Taterleg's further report. "There goes that girl on her horse up to
the gate--say, look at 'em, Duke! Them fellers is tryin' to make her let
'em through."

Lambert turned, indifferently, to