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 figure in it to such an extent as he had done. Maybe she believed it, maybe she did not.

Winch was off about his new duties immediately after dinner, with a word to Texas that he would return in a day or two and assign him to his post. He took nothing at all to eat but a package of dried beef, and dried beef of the range days was not the tender delicacy of this packing-house age. It was dried, and it required confidence to approach it, teeth to chew it, and a stomach equal to a corn sheller to do the rest. Texas wondered if pulling on dried beef had given Winch's teeth the peculiar outward slant that he had noticed when he saw him first. He believed that it was equal to it, anyhow.

Sallie McCoy came riding to the ranch alone along toward evening. Her mother had not felt equal to making the trip in the sun, Texas heard her explaining from where he sat on a bench under a cottonwood reading the poems of Robert Burns. He closed the book, moved more by the living poetry of Sallie McCoy's eyes than the written word, and went forward to take her horse.

She appeared taller afoot than in the saddle, still not too tall for a man whose heart was the proper distance from the ground. And there was something in her way of putting down her feet when she walked, something in the grace of her body and the