“If I was you, I’d put some hand that I knew to ridin’ that drift fence,” returned Jim significantly, as he mounted his horse to go.

“You’re plumb wrong, Jim,” returned the Dean earnestly.  “Why, the man don’t know a Cross-Triangle from a Five-Bar, or a Pot-Hook-S.”

“It’s your business, Will; I just thought I’d tell you,” growled Reid.  “Good-night!”

“Good-night, Jim!  I’m much obliged to you for ridin’ over.”

CHAPTER VII.

Things that endure.

When Kitty Reid told Patches that it was her soul sickness, from too much of nothing at all, that had sent her to visit Mrs. Baldwin that afternoon, she had spoken more in earnest than in jest.  More than this, she had gone to the Cross-Triangle hoping to meet the stranger, of whom she had heard so much.  Phil had told Kitty that she would like Patches.  As Phil had put it, the man spoke her language; he could talk to her of people and books and those things of which the Williamson Valley folk knew so little.

But as she rode slowly homeward after leaving Patches, she found herself of two minds regarding the incident.  She had enjoyed meeting the man; he had interested and amused her; had taken her out of herself, for she was not slow to recognize that the man really did belong to that world which was so far from the world of her childhood.  And she was glad for the little adventure that, for one afternoon, at least, had broken the dull, wearying monotony of her daily life.  But the stranger, by the very fact of his belonging to that other world, had stimulated her desire for those things which in her home life and environment she so greatly missed.  He had somehow seemed to magnify the almost unbearable commonplace narrowness of her daily routine.  He had made her even more restless, disturbed and dissatisfied.  It had been to her as when one in some foreign country meets a citizen from one’s old home town.  And for this Kitty was genuinely sorry.  She did not wish to feel as she did about her home and the things that made the world of those she loved.  She had tried honestly to still the unrest and to deny the longing.  She had wished many times, since her return from the East, that she had never left her home for those three years in school.  And yet, those years had meant much to her; they had been wonderful years; but they seemed, somehow—­now that they were past and she was home again—­to have brought her only that unrest and longing.

From the beginning of her years until that first great crisis in her life—­her going away to school—­this world into which she was born had been to Kitty an all-sufficient world.  The days of her childhood had been as carefree and joyous, almost, as the days of the young things of her father’s roaming herds.  As her girlhood years advanced, under her mother’s wise companionship and careful teaching, she had grown into her share of the household duties