blood, of the
woman you have loved well enough to make your wife--the combination
transfused--to grow, and develop, and work out to prove before God
and his fellow-man the wisdom or folly of the choice the father and
mother of him made when they took each other for better or worse."

"Yes,--when you put it that way, Jim, it makes a man think hard of the
tremendous seriousness of the step."

Jim grinned again.

"You needn't worry, anyway. If you keep on as you are doing, you'll
win the best and bonniest lassie in this Valley."

Phil quickly changed the subject, but a tell-tale ruddiness added to
the confirmations that Jim had been accumulating along that particular
line.

"Talking about my dad, Jim!" reverted Phil, "it is strange the
longings I have at times to see him and to patch up the old breach,
even if I might never be permitted to see him again after that.
But,--oh, well!--what's the use? I won't trouble inquiring about him
now--it is too late. And I guess he isn't worrying about me. All the
same, I'd give my right hand to see my little sister, Margery. When I
ran away, she was a bright, mischievous, fair-haired, little girl,
just starting school. She and I were the great chums. She will be
growing quite a young lady now.

"I fight the feeling, Jim,--but some day I fear the pulling from her
end will be too strong for me and I'll go back and hunt them up--if
only to stand in the shadows and watch her pass."

Jim looked at his watch and got up to fulfil a business engagement.

"Well, old man!--I never had a little sister. If I had had, I fancy I
wouldn't be here to-day. So that's how it goes. But we have a good
year ahead of us to buy and sell and loan for a fare-you-well; to make
a stake as big as all the others have made together in the last three
or four years. And we are going to do it, too. I feel it in the air.

"I don't know what will happen after that--some of the big fellows,
Royce Pederstone, Brenchfield and Arbuthnot are overloaded now, but
they keep on mortgaging and buying more. The newer ranchers here have
planted their orchards and are sitting still for the 'seven lean
years' till their orchards begin to bear, instead of getting busy with
truck stuff, poultry and pigs to keep them going. Some of them are
feeling the pinch already, for it costs like the devil to live
here--especially the way these fellows insist on living. They also are
mortgaging heavily. Man, if any kind of a slump came in