The Settling of the Sage

by Hal G. Evarts

But he had misread his signs. She felt no regret for Slade, only a wave of thankfulness, so powerful as almost to unnerve her, over Harris's escape, untouched. She accused herself of callousness but the spring of her sympathy, usually so ready, seemed dry as dust when she would have wasted a few drops on Slade.

The next day, in the late afternoon, Harris looked up and saw a chap-clad rider on the edge of the valley. She had ridden over unannounced on a horse she had borrowed from Brill. She answered the wave of his hat and urged the horse down the slope. He met her at the mouth of the lane and together they walked back to the new buildings of the ranch. The men breaking horses in the new corrals were the same old hands. The same old Waddles presided over the new cook shack. Her old things, rescued from the fire, were arranged in the living room of the new house. A row of new storerooms and the shop stood on the site of the old. And in the midst of all the improvements the old cabin first erected on the Three Bar stood protected by a picket fence on which a few vines were already beginning to climb.

"It didn't take long to throw them up, with all hands working, along in the winter when there wasn't much else to do," he said.

After the men had quit work to greet the returning Three Bar boss she went over every detail of the new house. The big living room and fireplace were modeled closely along the lines of her old quarters; heads and furs were on the walls, pelts and Indian rugs on the floors. Running water had been piped down from a sidehill spring. The new house was modernized. Then Harris saddled Calico and Papoose and they rode down to the fields.

As they turned into the lane they heard the twang of Waddles's guitar from the cook shack, the booming voice raised in song in mid-afternoon, a thing heretofore unheard of in the annals of Three Bar life.

"There'll be one real feast to-night," Harris prophesied. "Waddles will spread himself."

They rode past the meadow, covered with a knee-deep stand of alfalfa hay.

"It was only tramped down," he said. "She came up in fine shape this spring. We'll put up a thousand tons of hay."

He held straight on past the meadow, turned off below the lower fence and angled southwest across the range. The calves and yearlings along their route gave proof that the grading-up of the Three Bar herds was already having its effect. Ninety per cent. were straight red stock with only a few throwbacks to off-color strains. The two spoke but little and near sunset they rode out and dismounted on the ridge from which, almost a year before, they had viewed the first move of organized law in the Coldriver strip.

A white-topped wagon came toward them up the valley along the same route followed by the file of dusty riders on that other day. A woman held the reins over the team and a curly-haired youngster jostled about on the seat by her side. A man wrangled a nondescript drove of horses and cows in the rear.