Mary stared thoughtfully into the mirror. It was a better one than the sliver into which she had looked more than a year before, when Paul Langford came riding over the plains to the Lazy S. A better house had risen from the ashes of the homestead laid waste by the cattle rustlers. Affairs were well with George Williston now that the hand of no man was against him. He prospered.  
Louise stepped to the door.
 
“I am in despair, Mary,” she said, whimsically. “Mrs. White has ordered me out of the kitchen. What do you think of that?”
 
“Louise! Did you really have the hardihood to presume to encroach on Mother White’s preserves—you—a mere bride of five months’ standing? You should be grateful she didn’t take the broom to you.”
 
“She can cook,” said Louise, laughing. “I admit that. I only offered to peel potatoes. When one stops to consider that the whole county is coming to the ‘house-warming’ of the Lazy S, one can’t help being worried about potatoes and such minor things.”
 
“Do you think the whole county is coming, Louise?” asked Mary.
 
“Of course,” said Louise Gordon, positively, slipping away again. She was a welcome guest at the ranch, and her heart was in the success of to-night’s party.
 
Mary had dressed early. As hostess, she had laid aside her short skirt, leather leggings, and other boyish “fixings” which she usually assumed for better ease in her life of riding. She was clad simply in a long black skirt and white shirt-waist. Her hair was coiled in thick braids about her well-shaped head, lending her a most becoming stateliness.
 
Would Paul Langford come? He had been bidden. Her father could not know that he would not care to come. Her father did not know that she had sent Langford away that long-ago night in December and that he had not come back—at least to her. Naturally, he had been bidden first to George Williston’s ‘house-warming.’ The men of the Three Bars and of the Lazy S were tried friends—but he would not care to come.
 
Listen! Some one was coming. It was much too soon for guests. The early October twilight was only now creeping softly over the landscape. It was a still evening. She heard distinctly the rhythmical pound of hoof-beats on the hardened trail. Would the rider go on to Kemah, or would he turn in at the Lazy S?
 
“Hello, the house!” hailed the horseman, cheerily, drawing rein at the very door. “Hello, within!”
 
The visitor threw wide the door, and Williston’s voice called cordially:
 
“Come in, come in, Langford! I am glad you came early.”
 
“Will you send Mary out, Williston? I need your chore boy to help me water Sade here.”
 
The voice was merry, but there was a vibrant tone in it that made the listening girl tremble a little. Langford never waited for opportunities. He made them.
 
Mary came to the door with quiet self-composure. She had known from the first the stranger was Langford. How like the scene of a summer’s day more than a year past; but how far sweeter the maid—how much more it meant to the man now than then!
 
“Father, show Mr. Langford in,” she said, smiling a welcome. “I shall be glad to take Sade to the spring.”
 
She took hold of the bridle rein trailing to the ground. Langford leaped lightly from his saddle.
 
“I said ‘help me,’” he corrected.
 
“The spring is down there,” she directed. “I think you know the way.” She turned to enter the house.
 
For an instant, Langford hesitated. A shadow fell across his face.
 
“I want you to come, Mary,” he said, simply. “It is only hospitable, you know.”
 
“Oh, if you put it in that way—,” she started gayly down the path.
 
He followed her more slowly. A young moon hung in the western sky. The air was crisp with the coming frost. The path was strewn with dead cottonwood leaves which rustled dryly under their feet.
 
At the spring, shadowed by the biggest cottonwood, she waited for him.
 
“I wish my father would cut down that tree,” she said, shivering.
 
“You are cold,” he said. His voice was not quite steady. He took off his coat and wrapped it around her, despite her protests. He wanted to hold her then, but he did not, though the touch of her sent the blood bounding riotously through his veins.
 
“You shall wear the coat I—do not want you to go in yet.”
 
“But Sade has finished, and people will be coming soon.”
 
“I will not keep you long. I want you to—Mary, my girl, I tried to kill Black, but—Jim—” his voice choked a little—“if it hadn’t been for Jim, Black would have killed me. I thought I could do it. I meant to have you. Jim said it was all the same—his doing it in my stead. I came to-night to ask you if it is the same. Is it, Mary?”
 
She did not answer for a little while. How still a night it was! Lights twinkled from the windows of the new house. Now and then a dry leaf rustled as some one, the man, the girl, or the horse, moved.
 
“It is the sam............