“What?” asked Eleanor, suddenly wakening up to the meaning of the chatter.  “What is your father?”

“He’s trunk jes’ now,” said the child.  Then she reached her face up to Eleanor’s confidentially.  The little teeth were very unclean and the breath was very garlicky, indeed.  “He’s goin’ t’ be a dummy,” she whispered with a gurgle of childish glee, “un’ he says he’ll easily hold ’em up for twenty thousand without doin’ a thing fur five years but whuttle un’ sput.”

“A dummy?  Oh,” said Eleanor.

Even the driver relaxed enough to flick the tandem grays with his whip and permit a twisted smile to play round the tobacco wad in his cheek.

They ate their late supper in the Ranch House by lamp light, her father scarcely uttering a word, the evening paper still sticking out of his coat pocket.

“I know this sheep affair has been a horrible, hideous loss,” she said.  “Is that what’s worrying you, father?”

MacDonald shoved back from the table.

“Pah, that’s nothing,” he said.

He stood waiting till the German cook had removed the dishes.  Then he drew the paper from his pocket.

“There’s something here I’m sorry you’ll have to know,” he said.  “You won’t understand how low the meaning of most of it is; but I’m sorry they hit you to try and hurt me.”

He threw himself down in a big leather chair.  She took the paper mechanically and sat on the arm of the chair to read.  She read slowly and deliberately to the end.  Then she re-read both columns; and the paper fell from her hands.  She did not know it, but the same suppressed fury was blazing in her face as she had seen on his at the stage door.

“So that is what was doing when I went to the Senator’s office this afternoon to plead with him that things could not go on in the old plundering way.  That is what his man’s visit meant here the other day to express sympathy with you for the loss of the sheep?  Now I understand what the loafers at the station meant, and the driver’s unfriendliness, and those unclean women; and to think they framed it all out of that innocent coat.  You know, father, Mr. Wayland had carried Fordie down from the Rim Rocks.  We carried the body in together.”

“Where is Wayland?” asked MacDonald; and she poured out the full story of all that had happened.  I hope, gentle reader, you will please to observe that if the father had viewed the facts of that recital through the same tainted mind as Mr. Bat Brydges, a breach would have occurred that neither time nor regret could have bridged.  I confess when I see breaches occur that wrench lives and break hearts through love harboring suspicion, I don’t think the love is very much worth the name.  You can’t both have your plant grow, and keep tearing up the roots to see if they are growing.  You can’t both throw mud in a spring and drink out of a well of love undefiled.  If love grows by what it feeds on, so does suspicion.  He did not once look up questioningly to her eyes.  Instead, he reached up and took hold of her hand.  For the first time in their lives, father and daughter came together.