"I wish a lot of folks with whole wits knew how to be as good a friend as
Johnny," said Douglas stoutly.
"So do I!" Mary's voice trembled, but her glance at the little old man was very lovely.
The rest of the meal was finished in silence, Douglas turning over in his mind this strange new picture of Judith's mother. Could anything, he wondered, change Judith so? A curious anger against his father's stupidity was at that moment born in Douglas' heart, an anger that never was wholly to leave him.
That evening, as Douglas sat in his favorite place beside the alfalfa stack, old Johnny led up his little gray mare.
"I'll be cowling myself along home now, Doug," he said. "John is awful insidious to me. I just want to say, Doug, that you're the first man in this valley ever stuck up for me and some day I depone I'll get even with you."
"Good for you, Johnny!" nodded Douglas. "When I get my old ranch going, you come up and work for me."
"I will so do," replied the old man solemnly, and he rode away in the moonlight.
And Douglas returned to the new theme old Johnny had given him. Of what were women made that they could be over-broken as his father had over-broken Mary? And why should Lost Chief, so small that control was simple, permit such a thing to be?