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 her. She was slender, tall, with a certain aristocratic refinement of features, not too pronounced, but traceable, which told of good lineage. Her hair, rippled and dark like her daughter's, was slightly touched with gray.

"So you picked Sid Coburn up on the train, did you?" she said, the inquiry sharpened by her curiosity to know something of what had gone before that chance meeting.

Tom Simpson seemed to read her desire, which required no sharp intellect to reach, indeed.

"I was on my way to the Panhandle, where I have friends," he replied. "But I had nothing definite ahead of me, so I considered one chance as good as another. Coburn had lost one of his men in Kansas City, Waco Johnson by name. On the condition that the said Waco didn't show up in due time, I was to have his job. It was just a chance shot, you see."

"I don't know much about Coburn," she said, speaking in a manner of reserve; "he hasn't been down in this part of the country long—eight or ten years. Came from up around Wichita somewhere, I believe. Are you from the east?"

"Wyoming, and out that way, madam."

"The reason I asked you if you were from the east was we had a man workin' for us some years ago who came from Boston. He had the same twang to his voice you have, only he was a little mushy and nosey. He was Harvard educated, he claimed, always blowin' about it like it was something big. I never could see where it had done him any good, anyhow. He was out here for experience, and he got it, all right, a little more of it than he could pack. They shot him in the leg up at Wellington."