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 if hurt by the implication that they were strangers in their own land.

Mrs. Duncan sighed, and said she knew it as well as they did, she guessed, but it didn't seem like they came home oftener than once every five years. Then she went on to tell Texas about her boys, five of them, all big enough to count as men in the work of the range, and that the other girl's name was Ruth, and that she was two years older than Naomi, and that Naomi would be eighteen her next birthday. All of which intimate information—for what can be more intimate among all a lady's secrets than her age—did not appear to disconcert the girls in the least.

Dee Winch did not say much, but there was a sufficiency in what he did say which gave one the feeling that he had said considerable. Texas answered Mrs. Duncan's ramifications from her original subject into an inquiry into his life, adventures, family, and prospects with a shyness of manner and softness in his words that caused the young ladies to lean and listen when he spoke.

He told her as much about himself as he had told the minister's wife, and short cuts and sharp turns could not draw from him anything more. It seemed a simple story for a man who had come to Cottonwood like a whirlwind and made himself a