bare head.

“Oh, my hat, please!” she exclaimed, with sudden remembrance of the head-covering she had left hanging in the carriage top. Curtis took it down for her and looked on with undisguised admiration while she tied it with a big bow of ribbon under her chin. Bancroft came back, explaining that they had driven since mid-forenoon from the base of Mangan’s Peak, and asking if Conrad did not think they had made pretty good time with their new team of horses. Curtis looked them over critically, praising their good points, and approving heartily when Bancroft told him they had been bought for both riding and driving, for he wanted Lucy, now that she was growing strong again, to become an expert horsewoman.

A big cottonwood tree grew beside the gate, and a little plot of grass, enclosed on three sides by whitewashed adobe walls, made a square of welcome green. Lucy Bancroft exclaimed with delight as they entered the tiny yard, stepping mincingly across the grass with lifted gown, and smiling back at the two men, while fleeting dimples played hide-and-seek in her cheeks.

“I’m so glad, Mr. Conrad,” she laughed, “that you haven’t any signs up to ‘keep off the grass,’ for I simply must walk on it. I never saw anything so lovely as this little lawn and this beautiful big green tree, after our long ride across the plain. It makes me think of that line in the Bible about ‘the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.’”

“Yes,” replied Curtis as he threw open the door. “I never knew until I came to New Mexico how much comfort and pleasure there can be in a few blades of grass. When I come in from a long ride and look at this little checker-board square of turf I feel as if I uncurled a whole yard of wrinkles and squints from around my eyes.”

The Socorro Springs ranch-house was a rambling sequence of adobe rooms, so joined one to another that they formed the eastern and part of the northern side of the big square corral. It was low and flat-roofed, and struggling tufts of weeds and grass grew along the top and trailed over the edge, adding their chapter to Nature’s endless tale of the unwearied determination of Life to evade and overcome Death. The rooms opened out of one another in a long row, all with outside doors looking toward the east and some with additional doors into the corral. A bare adobe yard sloping eastward was bordered by a trickling stream of water along which grew some willows and cottonwoods. Beyond it spread a golden-green field of young alfalfa, and beyond that the greenish-gray plain stretched to the far horizon. Across the front of the house was a narrow wooden porch, and house and porch, walls and sheds, were all a dazzling white that in the vivid sunshine smote the sight like a blow across the eyeballs. In the low, large room in front gayly colored Navajo rugs were spread on the floor, white muslin curtains hung at the windows, and rose-bedecked paper covered the walls and ceiling. Unpainted shelves of pine above a battered, flat-topped desk were filled with books, and the round table in the middle of the room was littered with newspapers, magazines, tobacco pouches, and pipes.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Peters, brought a pitcher of water, and Conrad explained to Lucy that the springs from which the ranch took its appellation, Los Ojos del Socorro, “The Springs of Succor,” had been so named nearly three hundred years before by a party of Spanish explorers, because they had come unexpectedly upon the pure waters when they were almost dead from thirst. At the housekeeper’s suggestion Lucy went into the next room to lie down for a half-hour’s rest before they should start for their home in Golden, twenty miles farther westward. The door, accidentally left ajar, swung part way open and she could hear plainly the voices of her father and Conrad as she lay with eyes closed and thoughts wandering, scarcely heeding what they said.

The two men were absorbed in a discussion of local politics. “Dan Tillinghurst is all right,” said Conrad. “He’s made a good sheriff and he ought to have the office again. I shall do all I can to have him renominated and to help elect him afterwards. But Dellmey Baxter for Congress again! That’s where I buck, and buck hard, and keep a-buckin’.”

“But he’s the head of the party in the Territory,” objected Bancroft. “He can bring out more votes than any other man we can put up. If we turn him down in the convention they’ll beat us at the polls.”

“We’ll deserve to be beaten if we nominate him, anyway. I can’t stomach him any longer, Aleck, and I don’t see how you can.”

“Oh, you’re prejudiced, Curt,” said the other, good-naturedly. “You know you can never see any good in a man you dislike, and you took a dislike to Baxter the first day you set foot in the Territory.”

“Maybe I am prejudiced; but in Dell Baxter’s case there’s ample reason to be, and I’d be ashamed of myself if I wasn’t. I know he’s a friend of yours, but that doesn’t prevent him from being the worst scoundrel in the whole Territory. I tell you, Aleck, there’s nothing that man wouldn’t do, unless it was something square and honest.”

“Come, come, Curt, that’s rank exaggeration. I’ve been associated with Dell Baxter financially ever since I located in this part of the country, and I’ve always found him strictly on the square.”

“Then it was because it was to his interest to be square. He’ll do you up yet, if he gets the chance and thinks it worth while. He’s had his finger in every crooked scheme that’s been put through from Raton to El Paso, and his hands are as bloody as his pockets are dirty.”

“Don’t you think it’s going a little too far,” asked Bancroft, smiling calmly, “to accuse a man in that wholesale way when you haven’t any basis for your assertions but the merest idle gossip?”

Conrad gave an indignant snort. “Oh, I’m not saying he’s done the jobs himself. He thinks too much of that fat paunch of his to put that into any danger. But why does he keep those Mexican thugs hanging around him if it isn’t to use them for things he wouldn’t dare do himself? Why, I heard from Santa Fe only last week that he’s taken into his pay that Mexican cutthroat, Liberato Herrara, whom he saved last Winter from conviction for the Paxton murder.”

“No, Aleck,” he went on. “I buck when it comes to Dell Baxter for Congress again. If he gets the nomination and the other side puts up Johnny Martinez, as it’s likely they will, I’m going to support Johnny.”

“But he’s a Mexican.”

“I don’t care what he is as long as he’s a decent man. He won’t be a disgrace to the Territory in Washington, and that’s more than you can say of Baxter.”

Bancroft’s impassive face lighted with a bantering smile. “There’s no limit to your bad opinion of a man, is there, Curt, if he once gets into your disfavor? By the way, is it true that the Castletons are behind Johnny Martinez?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m their hired man here on the ranch, but my vote’s my own, and so’s what little influence I may have, and I’ll do with both of ’em just what I damn please. And if it came to a show-down, I’d be perfectly willing to lose my job if that would keep Dell Baxter from going back to Congress.”

Bancroft laughed again. Conrad’s eye, as he turned to his desk for more cigars, fell upon the little pile of letters and papers he had just received. On the top lay the Tremper & Townsend envelope. “By the way,