Hobart, with all sail set, bore
down upon them.

"Come! Come, Harley!" he cried, with the perfect frankness that usually
distinguished him, "we don't permit any selfish monopolists here. We are
all cast away on a desert island, so to speak, and there are a lot of us
men and only two women, one of whom is mortgaged!"

Then he was welcoming Miss Morgan in florid style; and there, too, was
the ancient beau, Tremaine, displaying all his little arts of elegance
and despising Hobart's obvious methods; and Blaisdell, and all the
others, forming a court about her and giving her an attention which
could not fail to please her and bring a deeper red to her cheeks and a
brighter flash to her eyes. It seemed to Mrs. Grayson, looking on, that
the girl had been hungry for something which she had now found, and in
finding which she was happy, and, despite her sense of loyalty, she felt
a glow of sympathy.

But the sense of duty in Mrs. Grayson was strong, and while she
hesitated much and sought for mental excuses to avoid it, she wrote a
long letter to "King" Plummer that evening in the waiting-room of a
little wayside hotel. In many things that she said she was beautifully
vague; but she told him how glad she was that he would join them so
soon; she spoke of the quarrel between the cattlemen and the sheepmen as
a closed affair, and complimented him on his skill in bringing it to an
end so quickly; it was all the better because now he could come to them
at once, and she boldly said how much Sylvia was missing him. But when
she sealed and addressed the letter she reflected awhile before dropping
it in the box on the wall.

"Now, ought I to do this?" she asked herself. "Have I the right to
hasten or to divert the course of affairs?"

She decided that she had the right, and mailed the letter.

"King" Plummer came a few days later--he said that he "just blew in a
few days ahead of time"--and received a hearty welcome from everybody,
which he returned in double measure in his broad, spontaneous way. He
placed a sounding kiss upon the somewhat flushed brow of Sylvia Morgan,
and exclaimed, "Well, my little girl, aren't you glad to see me ahead of
time?" She replied quickly, though not loudly, that she was, and then he
announced that he would stay with them for a long while. "These are my
mountains," he said, "and I'll have to show you the way through them."

"King" Plummer, although inclined to be masterful, was admitted at once
into