So the bungalow stood there in the glaring sun, surrounded by a scrap of lawn which the Arizona winds whipped and buffeted with sand and wind all summer, and vines which the wind tousled into discouragement.  And fifty yards away squatted the old adobe house in the sand, with a tree at each front corner and a narrow porch extending from one to the other.

Beyond the adobe, toward the sheltering bluff, a clutter of low sheds, round-pole corrals, a modern barn of fair size, and beside it a square corral of planks and stout, new posts, continued the tale of how progress was joggling the elbow of picturesqueness.  Sudden’s father had built the adobe and the oldest sheds and corrals, when he took all the land he could lawfully hold under government claims.  Later he had bought more; and Sudden, growing up and falling heir to it all, had added tract after tract by purchase and lease and whatever other devices a good politician may be able to command.

Sudden’s father had been a simple man, content to run his ranch along the lines of least resistance, and to take what prosperity came to him in the natural course of events.  Sudden had organized a Company, had commercialized his legacy, had “married money,” and had made money.  Far to the north and to the east and west ran the lines of other great ranches, where sheep were handled in great, blatting bands and yielded a fortune in wool.  There were hills where Selmer cattle were wild as deer—­cattle that never heard the whistle of a locomotive until they were trailed down to the railroad to market.

These made the money for Selmer and his Company.  But it was the Rolling R, where the profits were smaller, that stood closest to Sudden’s heart.  There was not so much money in horses as there was in sheep; Sudden admitted it readily enough.  But he hated sheep; hated the sound of them and the smell of them and the insipid, questioning faces of them.  And he loved horses; loved the big-jointed, wabbly legged colts and the round-bodied, anxious mothers; loved the grade geldings and fillies and the registered stock that he kept close to home in fenced pastures; loved the broom-tail bronks that ranged far afield and came in a dust cloud moiling up from their staccato hoof beats, circled by hoarse, shouting riders seen vaguely through the cloud.

There was a thrill in watching a corral full of wild horses milling round and round, dodging the whispering ropes that writhed here and there overhead to settle and draw tight over some unlucky head.  There was a thrill in the taming—­more thrills than dollars, for until the war overseas brought eager buyers, the net profits of the horse ranch would scarcely have paid for Mary V’s clothes and school and what she demurely set down as “recreation.”

But Sudden loved it, and Mary V loved it, and Mary V’s mother loved whatever they loved.  So the Rolling R was home.  And that is why the Rolling R boys looked upon Mary V with unglamoured eyes, being thoroughly accustomed to the sight of her and to the sharp tongue of her and to the frequent discomfort of having her about.