picturesque, and so far from being Eastern as to
lack cleanliness or even comfort, and the young Englishman who rode over
the hill one sunset was bitterly disappointed in the "whole plant."

"I shall stay here but one night," said he, as he entered the untidy
house.

He stayed five years, and the cause of this change of mind lay in the
person of Fan Blondell, the daughter of the old man who owned the ranch
and to whom young Lester had been sent to "learn the business" of
cattle-raising.

Fan was only seventeen at this time, but in the full flower of her
physical perfection. Lithe, full-bosomed, and ruddy, she radiated a
powerful and subtle charm. She had the face of a child--happy-tempered
and pure--but every movement of her body appealed with dangerous
directness to the sickly young Englishman who had never known an hour of
the abounding joy of life which had been hers from the cradle. Enslaved
to her at the first glance, he resolved to win her love.

His desire knew no law in affairs of this kind, but his first encounter
with Blondell put a check to the dark plans he had formed--for the
rancher had the bearing of an aged, moth-eaten, but dangerous old bear.
His voice was a rumble, his teeth were broken fangs, and his hands
resembled the paws of a gorilla. Like so many of those Colorado ranchers
of the early days, he was a Missourian, and his wife, big, fat, worried
and complaining, was a Kentuckian. Neither of them had any fear of dirt,
and Fan had grown up not merely unkempt, but smudgy. Her gown was
greasy, her shoes untied, and yet, strange to say, this carelessness
exercised a subduing charm over Lester, who was fastidious to the point
of wasting precious hours in filling his boots with "trees" and folding
his neckties. The girl's slovenly habits of dress indicated, to his
mind, a similar recklessness as to her moral habits, and it sometimes
happens that men of his stamp come to find a fascination in the
elemental in human life which the orderly no longer possess.

Lester, we may explain, was a "remittance man"--a youth sent to America
by his family on the pretense of learning to raise cattle, but in
reality to get him out of the way. He was not a bad man; on the
contrary, he was in most ways a gentleman and a man of some reading--but
he lacked initiative, even in his villainy. Blondell at once called him
"a lazy hound"--provoked thereto by Lester's slowness of toilet of a
morning, and had it not been for Fa