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 ized at once that the cowman felt himself sold, and in a ridiculous situation.

The children came racing out of the house, swooping down on the buggy, stopping as abruptly as a flock of blackbirds a little way off, where they stood silently expectant. Mrs. Coburn appeared in the kitchen door, wiping a dish, a little more towsled than she had looked the evening before. She said nothing. Coburn did not greet her, but he put out his hand towards his tow-headed flock in a sort of benedictory motion of recognition, then advanced on Simpson with suspicious caution, evidently hardly crediting his own eyes. Simpson was drying his hands on a big red handkerchief in front of the bunk-house door.

"When did you git here?" Coburn asked.

He was looking Simpson up and down and through and through, stern displeasure displacing his astonishment, a surly challenge in his voice.

"Last evening," Simpson replied. "It was an unfortunate mixup—I blundered around all night."

"Where's my saddle?"

"Inside."

Coburn made a break for it, unfastened it from the bunk with nervous haste and came carrying it out into the sun. He threw it down and stood looking at the bundle in the slicker behind it.

"That's been opened! them ain't my knots," he said.

He whirled on Simpson with a look that charged conversion of property and larceny by night at the very mildest interpretation. The young man in the buggy drove a