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 direct orders. Tippie told Rawlins she was designing to put something over on him while he was away among the herders stocking their wagons and paying them their wages.

"She can't force that girl to marry him, it's preposterous to think she can," Rawlins said.

"You don't know Lila Duke as well as I do. It wouldn't surprise me to come back and find that girl married to that pair of scissors and sent off to Missouri. It's bad enough to come from there, but it's worse to have to go back."

"Is Edith from Missouri too?"

"Kansas City. Her father was a railroad man, killed in a wreck."

"I feel like her neighbor," Rawlins said.

But he did not see any such end to the mail-order romance as Tippie feared. It was too ridiculous to have a serious possibility in his eyes. Edith was so heartily ashamed of her part in it, of Peck's boasting to the liveryman, and resentful of the fellow's familiarities, that she could not be reconciled to even a friendly footing.

However agreeable Peck may have been in a mail-order course of courtship, he was a disappointment when reared up before Edith on his big flat feet. Rawlins was not particularly concerned in the case at all. Edith was not in a situation deserving any broad sympathy, yet he had been, and still was, willing to bear a hand in prying Peck away from what he doubtless thought to be a pretty good thing.

In the course of a few days a true appreciation of his standing and chances with Edith would penetrate