The girl’s breath came short and quick, and the last part of her question was uttered in a rapid, jerky fashion. John Horton felt her tremble with suppressed excitement, and a light began to dawn upon him. He imagined, and rightly, that the girl was half-afraid of her mother.
“In such a case as that, Ethel, can you doubt the stand I would take?”
“No, but let me hear you say it, daddy; let me hear you say it—just what you would do.”
“On your side, my daughter, on your side forever, and we would fight to a finish on that line, if it took all the beeves and mavericks on the range.”
“Oh, daddy, daddy,” cried the girl, as she threw her other arm around his neck and gave way to a flood of tears, “I—I love you so—so much!”
Tears sprang to the cattle king’s eyes. Ethel’s soft sobs stole out along the veranda into the calm moonlight and away on the shadows into the woods where they lost themselves among the tall trees and on the wandering night winds. When she reached her own room that night, she wrote a letter to Jack Redfield, which read as follows:
“Dearest Jack:—Daddy is on our side. I am almost too happy to write. I know now what that feeling was,—love, Jack, love for you. Come and see me as soon as you can, and meet the grandest daddy in the whole world. Yes, I love you, love you, love you.
“All your own,
“Ethel.”
Mrs. Lyman Osborn called the next day, and in her neighborly kindness she consented to carry this letter, with others, from the Horton ranch to the post-office.
On the following day Mrs. J. Bruce-Horton called at the Osborn home.
“My dear Lucy,” said she, sinking into a chair in Mrs. Osborn’s exquisite boudoir, “I felt that I must see you. You attended to the letter properly, I suppose?”