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 CHAPTER II

THE PANTHER

IN the ranch house old Joseph Cumberland frowned on the floor as he heard his daughter say: "It isn't right, Dad. I never noticed it before I went away to school, but since I've come back I begin to feel that it s shameful to treat Dan in this way."

Her eyes brightened and she shook her golden head for emphasis. Her father watched her with a faintly quizzical smile and made no reply. The dignity of ownership of many thousand cattle kept the old rancher's shoulders square, and there was an antique gentility about his thin face with its white goatee. He was more like a quaint figure of the seventeenth century than a successful cattleman of the twentieth.

"It is shameful, Dad,"she went on, encouraged by his silence, "or you could tell me some reason."

"Some reason for not letting him have a gun?" asked the rancher, still with the quizzical smile.