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 too low-down and onery to be grateful for her delicacy. This self-arraignment braced him up like a good friendly kick. He grinned as he rubbed his hand over the long blue gun, and looked toward the house, wondering if she was up, and whether he was to have breakfast with her, and how the day was going to start.

He had liked that girl from the very first sight, he recalled. Even before the first sight, when her well-modulated, soft voice had spoken in his defense at the hardware merchant's door. The farther they walked together last night the higher his opinion had mounted. She was the right kind of a girl, and it would be a comfort to any man to hold her pretty soft chin in the cup of his hand.

But there would not be much chance of further intimacy, judging from the evidence of wealth around the place. Bill looked at the house, which he approved in all particulars, and considered very fine. There was nothing lacking in its environment to him, any more than there was to its owner. There are that kind of people everywhere, not alone in the cattle lands, to whom a house is the same as a diamond. What is the difference where you wear it, as long as people can see you've got it?

It was a very fine house indeed, a house after his own desire. The Moores were people of consequence, plainly. It would take a footless man like him a long time to get up to the level where he might hope to enter that house on terms of equality and hold Zora Moore's nice little friendly hand.

There was a smell of coffee in the cool air, and a