the family—with long hair and goggles? I come acrost one once that hunted bugs. He called a chinch bug a Rhyparochromus, but he saddled his horse without a blanket and put bakin’ powder in the sour-dough.”

In the same way that the farmer’s wife knew that boys liked gizzards, she knew that Bruce was writhing under the attention and the ridicule.

“He’ll be a cattleman like his dad,” and she smiled upon him.

His father shook his head.

“No, he doesn’t take hold right. Why, even when I was his age I could tell a stray in the bunch as far as I could see it, and he don’t know the milk cow when she gets outside of the barn. I tell his mother I’m goin’ to work him over again with a trace strap——”

The sensitive boy could bear no more. He gave one regretful glance at his heaping plate, a shamed look at Mrs. Mosher, then sprang to his feet and faced his father.

“I won’t learn cattle, and you can’t make me!” he cried, with blazing eyes. “And you won’t work me over with a trace strap! You’ve licked me all I’ll stand. I’ll go away! I’ll run away, and I won’t come home till I’m white as a darned sheep!”

“Bruce!” His father reached for his collar, but the boy was gone. His chair tipped over, and his precious rock dropped from his shirt front and bounced on the floor. It was a precious rock, too, a fragment of meteorite, one which fell perhaps in the shower of meteoric stones in Iowa in ’79.

“He’s the touchiest child I ever saw,” said Burt apologetically, “and stubborn as a mule; but you’d better set his plate away. I guess the gentleman will return, since he’s twenty-five miles from home.”

The farmer’s wife called after the boy from the doorway, but he did not stop. Hatless, with his head thrown back and his fists clenched tight against his sides, he ran with all his might, his bare feet kicking up the soft, deep dust. There was something pathetic to her in the lonely little figure vanishing down the long, straight road. She wished it had not happened.

“It isn’t right to tease a child,” she said, going back to her seat.

“Well, there’s no sense in his acting like that,” Burt answered. “I’ve tried to thrash some of that stubbornness out of him, but his will is hard to break.”

“I don’t believe in so much whipping,” the woman defended. “Traits that children are punished for sometimes are the makin’ of them when they’re grown. I think that’s why grandparents are usually easier with their grandchildren than they were with their own—because they’ve lived long enough to see the faults they whipped their children for grow into virtues. Bruce’s stubbornness may be perseverance when he’s a man, and to my way of thinking too much pride is far better than too little.”

“Pride or no pride, he’ll do as I say,” Burt answered, with an obstinacy of tone which made the farmer’s wife comment mentally that it was not difficult to see from whom the boy had inherited that trait.

But it was the only one, since, save in coloring and features, they were totally dissimilar, and Burt seemed to have no understanding of his passionate, warm-hearted, imaginative son. Perhaps, unknown to himself, he harbored a secret resentment that Bruce had not been the little girl whose picture had been as fixed and clear in his mind before Bruce came as though she were already an actuality. She was to have had flaxen hair, with blue ribbons in it, and teeth like tiny, sharp pearls. She was to have come dancing to meet him on her toes, and to have snuggled contentedly on his lap when he returned from long rides on the range. Boys were all right, but he had a vague notion that they belonged to their mothers. Bruce was distinctly “his mother’s boy,” and this was tacitly understood. It was to her he went with his hurts for caresses, and with his confidences for sympathy and understanding.

Now there was nothing in Bruce’s mind but to get to his mother. While his breath lasted and he burned with outraged pride and humiliation, the boy ran, his thought a confused jumble of mortification that Mrs. Mosher should know that he got “lickings,” of regret for the gizzard and mashed potatoes and lemon pie, of wonder as to what his mother would say when he came home in the middle of the night and told her that he had walked all the way alone.

He dropped to a trot, and then to a walk, for it was hot, and even a hurt and angry boy cannot run forever. The tears dried to grimy streaks on his cheeks, and the sun blistered his face and neck, while he discovered that stretches of stony road were mighty hard on the soles of the feet. But he walked on purposefully, with no thought of going back, thinking of the comforting arms and shoulder that awaited him at the other end. After all, nobody took any interest in rocks, except mother; nobody cared about the things he really liked, except mother.

Toward the end of the afternoon his footsteps lagged, and sunset found him resting by the roadside. He was so hungry! He felt so little, so alone, and the coming darkness brought disturbing thoughts of coyotes and prairie wolves, of robbers and ghosts that the hired man said he had seen when he had stayed out too late o’ nights.

Ravines, with their still, eloquent darkness, are fearsome places for imaginative boys to pass alone. Hobgoblins—the very name sent chills up and down Bruce’s spine—would be most apt to lurk in some such place, waiting, waiting to jump on his back! He broke and ran.

The stars came out, and a late moon found him trudging still. He limped and his sturdy shoulders sagged. He was tired, and, oh, so sleepy, but the prolonged howl of a wolf, coming from somewhere a long way off, kept him from dropping to the ground. Who would have believed that twenty-five miles was such a distance? He stopped short, and how hard his heart pumped blood! Stock-still and listening, he heard the clatter of hoofs coming down the road ahead of him. Who would be out this time of night but robbers? He looked about him; there was no place on the flat prairie to hide except a particularly dark ravine some little way back which had taken all his courage to go through without running.

Between robbers and hobgoblins there seemed small choice, but he chose robbers. With his fists clenched and the cold sweat on his forehead, he waited by the roadside for the dark rider, who was coming like the wind.

“Hello!” The puffing horse was pulled sharply to a standstill.

“Oh, Wess!” His determination to die without a sound ended in a broken cry of gladness, and he wrapped an arm around the hired man’s leg to hold him.

“Bruce! What you doin’ here?”

“They plagued me. I’m going home.”

“You keep on goin’, boy. I’m after you and your father.” There was something queer in the hired man’s voice—something that frightened him. “Your mother’s taken awful sick. Don’t waste no time; it’s four miles yet; you hustle!” The big horse jumped into the air and was gone.

It was not so much what the hired man said that scared him so, but the way he said it. Bruce had never known him not to laugh and joke, or seen him run his horse like that.

“Oh, mamma, mamma!” he panted as he stumbled on, wishing that he could fly.

When he dragged himself into the room, she was lying on her bed, raised high among the pillows. Her eyes were closed, and the face which was so beautiful to him looked heavy with the strange stupor in which she lay.

“Mamma, I’m here! Mamma, I’ve come!” He flung himself upon the soft, warm shoulder, but it was still, and the comforting arms lay limp upon the