The Settling of the Sage

by Hal G. Evarts

All through the fall and early winter she had scarcely an idle hour. Her days here were almost as fully occupied as they had been before. And in the late winter, after having visited other school friends who lived farther east, she found herself anticipating the return to the Colton home as eagerly as always in the past she had looked forward to seeing the Three Bar after a long period away from it.

The grip of winter was receding and a few of the hardier trees were putting out buds when she returned. Every evening Deane was with her and together they planned the next, as once she and Harris had planned before her fireplace in the old ranch house. For the first time in her life she was glad to be sheltered and pampered as were other girls. Gliding servants anticipated her wishes and carried them out. But with it all there was a growing restlessness within her,—a vague dissatisfaction for which she could not account. She groped for an answer but the analysis could not be expressed or definitely cleared in her mind.

She sat in the Colton library waiting for Deane to come and take her to a lakeside clubhouse for the evening. Tiny leaves showed on the trees and the lawn was a smooth velvet green.

Slade's words of the long ago recurred to her.

"A soft front lawn to range in," she quoted aloud. The reason for her restlessness came with the words.

Deane planned with her of evenings but the planning was all of play. No word of work crept into it. If only he would accept her as wholly into that part of his life as he did into the rest. She suddenly felt that he was excluding her from something it was her right to share. Their planning together was not constructive but something which led nowhere, a restless, hectic rush for amusements which she enjoyed but which could not make up the whole of her life. Always she had said that men went to extremes and made of their wives either drudges or little tinsel queens. They never followed the middle course and made them full partners through thick and thin.

And suddenly she longed to sit for just one evening before the fire and plan real work with Cal Harris. He had been the one man she had known who had asked that she work with him, instead of insisting that she work for him,—or that he should work for her. She had drifted along, expecting that that same state of affairs would go on indefinitely, believing that he filled the void left by old Cal Warren. But now she knew he held that place he had created for himself. They had worked together and she had deserted the sinking ship to play the part of the tinsel queen.

The men would be just in from the horse round-up and breaking out the remuda, preparatory to starting after the calves. She pictured Waddles bawling the summons to feed from the cook-house door. She was conscious of a flare—half of resentment, half of apprehension—toward Harris for not having sent a word of affairs at the ranch.

"There's millions of miles of sage just outside," she quoted. "And millions of cows—and girls." Perhaps he had gone in search of them. Perhaps, after all, he had found that the road to the outside was not really closed as he had once told her it was.

Judge Colton entered the room and interrupted her reverie by handing her a paper. In the first black headline she saw Slade's name and Harris's; an announcement of the last chapter of the Three Bar war.