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 her the nobility of the earth. Whatever she had seen of life in her schooling and travels beyond the range, her heart had been molded there in that land; its ideals were her own, its free interpretations of right composed her own moral code.

"So you think you'll stay here on the range," she said, curious to the core to learn what he meant to do for a livelihood there. "If you don't go into the cattle business there's nothing for you but sheep, unless you turn nester."

The last choice she added with an outflung word, as one names a thing outlawed by common contempt, impossible by reason of its very baseness. Barrett did not reply at once. There was so much of forecast of the standing he would assume in her opinion if he should proceed in the hay-making venture with Fred Grubb, that his mind veered from that business.

"There's somebody coming," said he, catching the sound of an approaching horse.

"You've got a good ear if you hear anybody," she said, discounting the news in that superior way of one who resents being beaten at his own trade by an outsider.

"Yes," he admitted, "a man's ears sharpen at sea."

"You're right, I beg your pardon; there is somebody coming. But it doesn't ride like Uncle Hal."

Barrett thought it must be Findlay, or a man sent from Eagle Rock camp by him, arriving with the news of the half-breed's death, and other particulars of the failure of their plot, for Nearing's ear. For he could not get it out of his thought that the mestizo had been