"Suit me!" said she. "Are you expecting to make that your future home, Fred?"
"I'll leave that with you, dear. If you insist upon it we can live elsewhere and do as we did on the Colorado ranch, leaving faithful men to manage it for us."
"Fred, I could live contentedly anywhere in the world where you are satisfied and can make money.
"Mrs. Hamilton, however," she continued, "is horrified at the idea of Mary living so far from her. She has a great fear of the climate of Texas, and she thinks the people, too, down there are nearly half savages."
"Well, can't you tell her better than that?"
"I have told her all about how I found the people down there at Crabtree, but she says I was there at a hotel where only people of refinement live, and that I know nothing about the people out in the country. I laughed at her and asked her if she knew anything about them herself, and she retorted that everybody who read newspapers knew what sort of people lived down there."
"Well, dear, Terry and I have come up to see if we could persuade you and Mary to go down there with us and spend the fall and winter."
"Fred, I am perfectly willing to go anywhere that brother goes along with us, and I will do my best to get Mrs. Hamilton's consent for Mary to go, for she has never been down in that section of the country."
"Well, you go, anyhow," suggested Fred. "I want you to see the new ranch. I wouldn't think of making a home at the ranch we looked at when we went down to Crabtree. The one that we afterwards bought as an investment is the one I mean. I believe that we can, eventually, build up a little place of resort about that big, bold mineral spring just a mile from the railroad track, and I intend to have the water analyzed. The physicians claim down there that it has been partially analyzed and is said to be the finest water in the South, but I am going to send a bottle of the water to a chemist in New York or Philadelphia who has an established reputation and have him analyze it.
"I do hope, though," he added, "that you will plead with Mrs. Hamilton for her consent to let Mary go down and see the country."