“Then Lawler must be wealthy.”

“I reckon he’s got wads of dust, ma’am.”

The woman’s eyes glowed with satisfaction.

“Well,” she said; “I was just curious about him.  He is a remarkably striking-looking man, isn’t he?”

“You’ve hit it, ma’am,” grinned Corwin.  “I’ve been years tryin’ to think up a word that would fit him.  You’ve hit it.  He’s different.  Looks like one of them statesmen with cowpuncher duds on—­like a governor or somethin’, which is out of place here.”

The woman smiled affirmation.  “So he does,” she said, reflectively.  “He is big, and imposing, and strikingly handsome.  And he is educated, too, isn’t he?”

“I reckon he is,” said Corwin.  “Privately, that is.  His maw was a scholar of some kind back East, before she married Luke Lawler an’ come out here to live with him.  Luke’s dead, now—­died five years ago.  Luke was a wolf, ma’am, with a gun.  He could shoot the buttons off your coat with his eyes shut.  An’ he was so allfired fast with his gun that he’d make a streak of lightnin’ look like it was loafin’.  Luke had a heap of man in him, ma’am, an’ Kane is just as much of a man as his dad was, I reckon.  Luke was——­”

“About Kane Lawler,” interrupted the woman.  “You say he is well educated?”

“That’s about the only thing I’ve got ag’in’ him, ma’am.  I hold that no cattleman has got a right to know so durned much.  It’s mighty dangerous—­to his folks—­if he ever gets any.  Now take Kane Lawler.  If he was to marry a girl that wasn’t educated like him, an’ he’d begin to get fool notions about hisself—­why, it’d make it pretty hard for the girl to get along with him.”  He grinned.  “But accordin’ to what I hear, Kane ain’t goin’ to marry no ignoramus exactly, for he’s took a shine to Ruth Hamlin, Willets’ school teacher.  She’s got a heap of brains, that girl, an’ I reckon she’d lope alongside of Kane, wherever he went.”

The woman frowned.  “Is Mr. Lawler going to marry Ruth Hamlin?”

Corwin looked sharply at her.  “What do you suppose he’s fannin’ up to her for?” he demanded.  “Neither of them is a heap flighty, I reckon.  An’ Kane will marry her if she’ll have him—­accordin’ to the way things generally go.”

The woman smiled as she left Corwin and joined the older woman at the front of the store.  She smiled as she talked with the other woman, and she smiled as they both walked out of the store and climbed into a buckboard.  The smile was one that would have puzzled Corwin, for it was inscrutable, baffling.  Only one thing Corwin might have seen in it—­determination.  And that might have puzzled him, also.

CHAPTER VI

THE INVISIBLE POWER

Jay Simmons, the freight agent, was tilted comfortably in a chair near a window looking out upon the railroad platform when Lawler stepped into the office.  The office was on the second floor, and from a side window the agent had seen Lawler coming toward the station from Warden’s office.  He had been sitting near the side window, but when he saw Lawler approaching the station he had drawn his chair to one of the front windows.  And now, apparently, he was surprised to see Lawler, for when the latter opened the door of the office Simmons exclaimed, with assumed heartiness: