break off the relations between the former outlaw
and the young horse-wrangler, but thus far had met with no success.

Payson, feeling himself absolved by the death of Dick Lane from all
obligations to his friend, began openly to woo Echo Allen, but without
presuming upon the revelation of her love for him which she had made at
his proposition to go into the desert to Lane's rescue. She responded
to his courteous advances as frankly and naturally as a bud opens to
the gentle wooing of the April sun. Softened by her grief for Dick as
for a departed brother, as the flower is by the morning dew, the petals
of her affection opened and laid bare her heart of purest gold. The
gentle, diffident girl expanded into a glorious woman, conscious of her
powers, and proud and happy that she was fulfilling the highest
function of womanhood, that of loving and aiding with her love a noble
man.

Jack Payson, however, failed to get the proper credit for this sudden
flowering of Echo's beauty and charm. These were ascribed to her
year's schooling in the East, and her proud mother was offended by the
way in which she accepted the young ranchman's advances. "You hold
yourself too cheap," she said. "It is at least due to the memory of
poor Dick Lane" (whom, now that he was safely dead, she idealized as a
type of perfect manhood) "that you make Jack wait as long as you did
him." When Payson reasonably objected to this delay by pointing out he
was fully able to support a wife, as Lane had not been, and proposed,
with Echo's assent, six months as the limit of waiting, Mrs. Allen
resorted to her expedient--tears.

"BOO-HOO! you are going to take away my only daughter!"

The Colonel, however, though he had loved Dick as if he were his own
son, was delighted to the bottom of his hospitable soul that it was a
man not already in the family circle who was to marry Echo, especially
when he was a royal fellow like Jack Payson; so he arranged a
compromise between the time proposed by Mrs. Allen and that desired by
the lovers, and the date of the wedding was fixed nine months ahead.

"It will fall in June," said the old fellow, who knew exactly how to
handle his fractious wife; "the month when swell folks back in the East
do all their hitchin' up. Why, come to think of it, it was the very
month I ran off with you in, though I didn't know, then that we was
elopin' so strictly accordin' to the Book of Etikwet."

CHAPTER III

A Woman's L