it's necessary, Duke."

"It's enough to make you want to leave it, Vesta. It's bad enough to
have to dodge danger in a city, but out here, with all this lonesomeness
around you, it's worse."

"Do you feel it lonesome here?" She asked it with a curious soft
slowness, a speculative detachment, as if she only half thought of what
she said.

"I'm never lonesome where I can see the sun rise and set. There's a lot
of company in cattle, more than in any amount of people you don't know."

"I find it the same way, Duke. I never was so lonesome as when I was
away from here at school."

"Everybody feels that way about home, I guess. But I thought maybe you'd
like it better away among people like yourself."

"No. If it wasn't for this endless straining and watching, quarreling
and contending, I wouldn't change this for any place in the world. On
nights like this, when it whispers in a thousand inaudible voices, and
beckons and holds one close, I feel that I never can go away. There's a
call in it that is so subtle and tender, so full of sympathy, that I
answer it with tears."

"I wish things could be cleared up so you could live here in peace and
enjoy it, but I don't know how it's going to come out. It looks to me
like I've made it worse."

"It was wrong of me to draw you into it, Duke; I should have let you go
your way."

"There's no regrets on my side, Vesta. I guess it was planned for me to
come this far and stop."

"They'll never rest till they've drawn you into a quarrel that will give
them an excuse for killing you, Duke. They're doubly sure to do it since
you got away from them that night. I shouldn't have stopped you; I
should have let you go on that day."

"I had to stop somewhere, Vesta," he laughed. "Anyway, I've found here
what I started out to find. This was the end of my road."

"What you started to find, Duke?"

"A man-sized job, I guess." He laughed again, but with a colorless
artificiality, sweating over the habit of solitude that leads a man into
thinking aloud.

"You've found it, all right, Duke, and you're filling it. That's some
satisfaction to you, I know. But it's a man-using job, a life-wasting
job," she said sadly.

"I've only got myself to blame for anything that's happened to me here,
Vesta. It's not the fault of the job."

"Well, if you'll stay with me till I sell the cattle, Duke, I'll think
of you as the next best friend I ever had."

"I've got no intention of leaving you, Vest