"I am rather inclined to think, mama," said Marcia, "that you don't do Judith justice."
Trevors, with little to say to any one, took his departure in the forenoon, extracting from Hampton the promise to ride over and see the lumber-camp some day soon.
Judith, held at the office by a lot of first-of-the-month details, did not get away until close to eleven o'clock that morning. Then she rode swiftly down the river, a purpose of her own in mind. At the store she stopped for a sympathetic word with Charlie Miller who had long ago forgotten his own hurt in his grief and anger that he had lost her thousand dollars for her.
"What's a thousand dollars, Charlie?" she laughed at him. "We'll lose and make many a thousand before the year dies."
Just below the Lower End settlement she came upon Doc Tripp. He was in one of the quarantine hog-corrals, his sleeves rolled up, a puzzled look of worry puckering his boyish face.
"What's up, Doc?" asked Judith.
"Don't know, Judy. That's what gets my mad up. Just performed an autopsy on one of your Poland-China gilts."
"Found it dead?" asked Judith.
"Killed it," grunted Tripp. "Sick. Half dozen more are off their feed and don't look right. A man's always afraid of the cholera. And," stubbornly, "I won't believe it! There's been no chance of infection; why, there's not an infected herd this side of the Bagley ranch, sixty miles the other side of Rocky Bend, a clean hundred miles from here. But, just the same, I'm taking temperatures this morning and having my herders cut out all the dull-looking ones and break the herds up."
"Not getting nerves? Are you, Doc?" And Judith spurred on down the valley.