th
gray, and was white over his ears. His face was sallow and thin, with
deep lines. Under his round, prominent, brown eyes, like deadened
furnaces, were blue swollen welts. He had a bitter mouth and weak
chin, not wholly concealed by gray mustache and pointed beard. He wore
a long frock coat and a wide-brimmed sombrero, both black in color, and
so old and stained and frayed that along with the fashion of them they
betrayed that they had come from Texas with him. Jorth always
persisted in wearing a white linen shirt, likewise a relic of his
Southern prosperity, and to-day it was ragged and soiled as usual.

Ellen watched her father eat and waited for him to speak. It occured
to her strangely that he never asked about the sheep or the new-born
lambs. She divined with a subtle new woman's intuition that he cared
nothing for his sheep.

"Ellen, what riled Daggs?" inquired her father, presently. "He shore
had fire in his eye."

Long ago Ellen had betrayed an indignity she had suffered at the hands
of a man. Her father had nearly killed him. Since then she had taken
care to keep her troubles to herself. If her father had not been blind
and absorbed in his own brooding he would have seen a thousand things
sufficient to inflame his Southern pride and temper.

"Daggs asked me to marry him again and I said he belonged to a bad
lot," she replied.

Jorth laughed in scorn. "Fool! My God! Ellen, I must have dragged you
low--that every damned ru--er--sheepman--who comes along thinks he can
marry you."

At the break in his words, the incompleted meaning, Ellen dropped her
eyes. Little things once never noted by her were now come to have a
fascinating significance.

"Never mind, dad," she replied. "They cain't marry me."

"Daggs said somebody had been talkin' to you. How aboot that?"

"Old John Sprague has just gotten back from Grass Valley," said Ellen.
"I stopped in to see him. Shore he told me all the village gossip."

"Anythin' to interest me?" he queried, darkly.

"Yes, dad, I'm afraid a good deal," she said, hesitatingly. Then in
accordance with a decision Ellen had made she told him of the rumored
war between sheepmen and cattlemen; that old Isbel had Blaisdell,
Gordon, Fredericks, Blue and other well-known ranchers on his side;
that his son Jean Isbel had come from Oregon with a wonderful
reputation as fighter and scout and tracker; that it was no secret how
Colonel Lee Jorth was at the head of t