he declared. “They’ve tried to run me out of Deer Creek, but I’m there to stay. I have ten thousand more on the way, and the man that tries to stop me will find trouble.”

The car was descending into the valley of the Roaring Fork now, and wire fences and alfalfa fields on either side gave further evidence of the change in the land’s dominion. New houses of frame and old houses in fresh paint shone vividly from the green of the willows and cottonwoods. A ball-ground on the outskirts of the village was another guarantee of progress. The cowboy was no longer the undisputed prince of the country fair.

Down past the court-house, refurbished and deeper sunk in trees, Lee Virginia rode, recalling the wild night when three hundred armed and vengeful cowboys surrounded it, holding three cattle-barons and their hired invaders against all comers, resolute to be their own judge, jury, and hangman. It was all as peaceful as a Sunday afternoon at this moment, with no sign of the fierce passions of the past.

There were new store-buildings and cement walks along the main street of the town, and here and there a real lawn, cut by a lawn-mower; but as the machine buzzed on toward the river the familiar little old battlemented buildings came to view. The Palace Hotel, half log, half battlement, remained on its perilous site beside the river. The triangle where the trails met still held Halsey’s Three Forks Saloon, and next to it stood Markheit’s general store, from which the cowboys and citizens had armed themselves during the ten days’ war of cattle-men and rustlers.

The car crossed the Roaring Fork and drew up before two small shacks, one of which bore a faded sign, “The Wetherford House,” and the other in fresher paint, “The Wetherford Café.” On the sidewalk a group of Indians were sitting, and a half-dozen slouching white men stood waiting at the door.

At sight of her mother’s hotel Virginia forgot every other building, every other object, and when the driver asked, respectfully, “Where will you want to get off, miss?” she did not reply, but rose unsteadily in her seat, blindly reaching for her bag and her wraps. Her slim, gray-robed figure, graceful even in her dismay, appealed to every onlooker, but Gregg was the one to offer a hand.

“Allow me, miss,” he said, with the smile of a wolf.

Declining his aid, she took her bag from the driver and walked briskly up the street as if she were a resident and knew precisely where she wanted to go. “One o’ those Eastern tourists, I reckon?” she heard the old woman say.

As she went past the hotel-porch her heart beat hard and her breath shortened. In a flash she divined the truth. She understood why her mother had discouraged her coming home. It was not merely on account of the money—it was because she knew that her business was wrong.

What a squalid little den it was! How cheap, bald, and petty the whole town seemed of a sudden. Lee Virginia halted and turned. There was only one thing to be done, and that was to make herself known. She retraced her steps, pulled open the broken screen door, and entered the café. It was a low, dingy dining-room filled with the odor of ham and bad coffee. At the tables ten or fifteen men, a motley throng, were busily feeding their voracious jaws, and on her left, behind a showcase filled with cigars, stood her mother, looking old, unkempt, and worried. The changes in her were so great that the girl stood in shocked alarm. At last she raised her veil. “Mother,” she said, “don’t you know me?”

A look of surprise went over the older woman’s flabby face—a glow which brought back something of her other self, as she cried: “Why, Lee Virginny, where did you come from?”

The boarders stopped chewing and stared in absorbed interest, while Virginia kissed her blowsy mother.

“By the Lord, it’s little Virginny!” said one old fellow. “It’s her daughter.”

Upon this a mutter of astonishment arose, and the waiter-girls, giggling, marvelling, and envious, paused, their platters in hand, to exchange comment on the new-comer’s hat and gown. A cowboy at the washing-sink in the corner suspended his face-polishing and gaped over his shoulder in silent ecstasy.

For a full minute, so it seemed, this singular, interesting, absorbed immobility lasted; then a seedy little man rose, and approached the girl. His manner was grotesquely graceful as he said: “We are all glad to greet you home again, Miss Virginia.”

She gave her hand hesitatingly. “It’s Mr. Sifton, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he replied; “the same old ha’penny, only a little more worn—worn, not polished,” he added, with a smile.

She remembered him then—an Englishman, a remittance man, a “lord,” they used to say. His eyes were kind, and his mouth, despite its unshaved stubble of beard, was refined. A harmless little man—his own worst enemy, as the saying goes.

Thereupon others of the men came forward to greet her, and though she had some difficulty in recognizing one or two of them (so hardly had the years of her absence used them), she eventually succeeded in placing them all.

At length her mother led her through the archway which connected the two shanties, thence along a narrow hall into a small bedroom, into which the western sunset fell. It was a shabby place, but as a refuge from the crowd in the restaurant it was grateful.

Lize looked at her daughter critically. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with a girl like you.—Why, you’re purty—purty as a picture. You were skinny as a child—I’m fair dazed. Great snakes, how you have opened out!—You’re the living image of your dad.—What started you back? I told you to stay where you was.”

The girl stared at her helplessly, trying to understand herself and her surroundings. There was, in truth, something singularly alien in her mother’s attitude. She seemed on the defensive, not wishing to be too closely studied. “Her manner is not even affectionate—only friendly. It is as if I were only an embarrassing visitor,” the girl thought. Aloud she said: “I had no place to go after Aunt Celia died. I had to come home.”

“You wrote they was willing to keep you.”

“They were, but I couldn’t ask it of them. I had no right to burden them, and, besides, Mrs. Hall wrote me that you were sick.”

“I am; but I didn’t want you to come back. Lay off your things and come out to supper. We’ll talk afterward.”

The eating-house, the rooms and hallways, were all of that desolate shabbiness which comes from shiftlessness joined with poverty. The carpets were frayed and stained with tobacco-juice, and the dusty windows were littered with dead flies. The curtains were ragged, the paper peeling from the walls, and the plastering cracked into unsightly lines. Everything on which the girl’s eyes fell contrasted strongly with her aunt’s home on the Brandywine—not because that house was large or luxurious, but because it was exquisitely in order, and sweet with flowers and dainty arrangement of color.

She understood now the final warnings uttered by her friends. “You will find everything changed,” they had said, “because you are changed.”

She regretted bitterly that she had ever left her Eastern friends. Her mother, in truth, showed little pleasure at her coming, and almost nothing of the illness of which a neighbor had written. It was, indeed, this letter which had decided her to return to the West. She had come, led by a sense of duty, not by affection, for she had never loved her mother as a daughter should—they were in some way antipathetic—and now she found herself an unwelcome guest.

Then,