er friend alone.

"So you sent Jake away!" she said.

"Yes," said Hetty. "I don't know what made me, but I felt I had to. I
almost meant to take him."

Flora Schuyler nodded gravely. "But it wasn't because of that man
Clavering?"

"It was not," said Hetty, with a little laugh. "Don't you like him? He is
rather a famous man back there on the prairie."

Flora Schuyler shook her head. "No," she said; "he reminded me of that
Florentine filigree thing. It's very pretty, and I bought it for silver,
but it isn't."

"You think he's that kind of man?"

"Yes," said Miss Schuyler. "I wouldn't take him at face value. The
silver's all on top. I don't know what is underneath it, and would sooner
somebody else found out."

III

THE CATTLE-BARONS

It was a still, hot evening when a somewhat silent company of bronze-faced
men assembled in the big living room of Cedar Range. It was built of birch
trunks, and had once, with its narrow windows and loopholes for rifle
fire, resembled a fortalice; but now cedar panelling covered the logs, and
the great double casements were filled with the finest glass. They were
open wide that evening. Around this room had grown up a straggling wooden
building of dressed lumber with pillars and scroll-work, and, as it stood
then, flanked by its stores and stables, barns and cattle-boys' barracks,
there was no homestead on a hundred leagues of prairie that might compare
with it.

Outside, on the one hand, the prairie rolled away in long billowy rises, a
vast sea of silvery grey, for the grass that had been green a month or two
was turning white again, and here and there a stockrider showed
silhouetted, a dusky mounted figure against the paling flicker of saffron
that still lingered upon the horizon. On the other, a birch bluff dipped
to the Cedar River, which came down faintly chilled with the Rockies' snow
from the pine forests of the foothills. There was a bridge four miles
away, but the river could be forded beneath the Range for a few months
each year. At other seasons it swirled by, frothing in green-stained
flood, swollen by the drainage of snowfield and glacier, and there was no
stockrider at the Range who dared swim his horse across.

Sun and wind had their will with the homestead, for there was little
shelter from icy blizzard and scorching heat at Cedar; but though here and
there the frame-boarding gaped and the roof-shingles were rent, no man
accustomed to that country coul