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 this repudiation of the bargain upon which his hopes were shaped. He saw himself a struggling homesteader in a land where he had almost everything to learn, surrounded by sheepmen who knew all there was to be acquired in their tricky trade. Unless he could compete with them on their own terms he'd just as well save his energies for a more promising field. There was about as much honesty on one side of Galloway's fence as the other.

"Business is business," Mrs. Peck said in reply to Edith's criticism of her ethics.

"You ought to feel like a horsethief even to think of such a backdown on your word, Aunt Lila."

"Well, I ain't goin' to lose no sheep next winter, no difference whether Galloway's fence comes down or not," Mrs. Peck said, defiant in her stand. "I can feed, I'm ready to feed, but I'm not sayin' it wouldn't be cheaper for me and better for my sheep to run 'em in there where the grass ain't been touched all summer. I ain't beholdin' to nobody for openin' up no land. I'm purty well fixed the way I am."

"You promised Ned you'd let him have a band on shares if he held down his homestead three months, and now when you see it's going to be a free-for-all you pull in your horns."

"It's all right," Rawlins hastened to interpose in the interest of family peace, "your decision one way or the other doesn't make any difference to me, Mrs. Peck."

"If I were you," Edith advised him, "I'd take a shot at the first sheepman to show his nose within five miles of my place."

Edith was hot about it; her cheeks were as red as if