“Miss Wharton,” said Lawler gravely; “I confess I am puzzled.  You accept Warden’s hospitality, and yet you come here to betray him.”

She laughed.  “I am not accepting Gary’s hospitality.  My father is a member of the company that bought the Two Diamond, and I have as much right to be there as Gary has.  We live East—­in New York.  I came West out of curiosity.  I wanted to see the ranch.  And now that I am here I intend to stay.  I have always been eager to live in the West.”

“Then you don’t like Gary Warden?”

The girl’s face sobered.  “I like him.  That is all.”

Lawler’s eyes were still grave.  “Miss Wharton,” he said slowly; “do you know what Gary Warden is doing—­what the company with which your father is connected, is doing?”

“Yes,” said the girl, frankly; “they—­all of them—­are trying to control the western cattle market.”  She looked straight at him, with no sign of embarrassment.

“That is business, isn’t it?  It is what men are beginning to call ’big business.’  It means centralization of power, resources—­and a number of things that go with it.  It is an admirable scheme—­don’t you think?  It eliminates uncertainty, risk of loss.  It means the stabilizing of the cattle industry; it means gigantic profits to the men who have brains big enough to control it.”

Lawler smiled.  “Also, Miss Wharton, it means the complete subjection of the cattle raiser.  It means that competition will be stifled; that the cattle owner will be compelled to take what prices the buyers offer.  It means that the incentive to raise cattle will be destroyed.  It means the end of the open market—­which has always been a spur to industry.  It is evil.”

The girl laughed.  “How tragic!” she mocked.  “One would think we were facing a cataclysm, whereas business men are merely just beginning to take advantage of some of the opportunities that are everywhere around them.  It is all perfectly legal, isn’t it?  I have heard my father say that it is.”

Lawler’s smile grew slightly bitter.  He saw that the girl’s mind was merely skipping over the surface of the commercial sea upon which her father sailed a pirate craft; she had not plunged into the depths where she might have found the basic principles of all business—­fairness; she had taken no account of the human impulse that, in just men, impels them to grant to their fellows a fighting chance to win.

Watching her closely, Lawler saw in her the signs of frivolity and vanity that he had failed to see that day when he had met her in Willets.  Her attitude now revealed her as plainly as though he had known her all her days.  She comprehended none of life’s big problems; the relations of men to one another had not compelled her attention; the fine, deep impulses of sympathy had not touched her.  She was selfish, self-centered, light, inconsequential—­a woman who danced from under the burdens of life and laughed at those who were forced to bear them for her.