With a feeling that he was involving both the girl and himself in still darker storms, the young fellow yielded to her command, and together they walked along the weed-bordered path, while she continued:
"This isn't the first time Cliff has started in to discipline me; but it's obliged to be the last. He's the kind that think they own a girl just as soon as they get her to wear an engagement ring; but Cliff don't own me. I told him I wouldn't stand for his coarse ways, and I won't!"
Wayland tried to bring her back to humor. "You're a kind of 'new woman.'"
She turned a stern look on him. "You bet I am! I was raised a free citizen. No man can make a slave of me. I thought he understood that; but it seems he didn't. He's all right in many ways--one of the best riders in the country--but he's pretty tolerable domineering--I've always known that--still, I never expected him to talk to me like he did to-day. It certainly was raw." She broke off abruptly. "You mustn't let Frank Meeker get the best of you, either," she advised. "He's a mean little weasel if he gets started. I'll bet he put Cliff up to this business."
"Yes, he just as good as told me he'd do it. I know Frank, he's my own cousin, and someways I like him; but he's the limit when he gets going. You see, he wanted to get even with Cliff and took that way of doing it. I'll ride up there and give him a little good advice some Saturday."
He was no longer amused by her blunt speech, and her dark look saddened him. She seemed so unlike the happy girl he met that first day, and the change in her subtended a big, rough, and pitiless world of men against which she was forced to contend all her life.
Mrs. McFarlane greeted Norcross with cordial word and earnest hand-clasp. "I'm glad to see you looking so well," she said, with charming sincerity.
"I'm browner, anyway," he answered, and turned to meet McFarlane, a short, black-bearded man, with fine dark eyes and shapely hands--hands that had never done anything more toilsome than to lift a bridle rein or to clutch the handle of a gun. He was the horseman in all his training, and though he owned hundreds of acres of land, he had never so much as held a plow or plied a spade. His manner was that of the cow-boss, the lord of great herds, the claimant of empires of government grass-land. Poor as his house looked, he was in reality rich. Narrow-minded in respect to his own interests, he was well in advance of his neighbors on matters relating to the general welfare, a curious mixture of greed and generosity, as most men are, and though he had been made Supervisor at a time when political pull still crippled the Service, he was loyal to the flag. "I'm mighty glad to see you," he heartily began. "We don't often get a man from the sea-level, and when we do we squeeze him dry."