them with resignation, and even pleasure, because they all had pleasant things to say about her father and good wishes to express for the destined heir, Terence Colby. It was carefully explained that this selection of an heir had been made by both Elizabeth and Vance, which removed all cause for remark. Vance himself regarded the guests with distinct amusement. But Terence was disgusted.
“What these true Westerners need,” he said to Elizabeth later in the day, “is a touch of blood. No feeling of family or the dignity of family precedents out here.”
It touched her shrewdly. More than once she had felt that Terry was on the verge of becoming a complacent prig. So she countered with a sharp thrust.
“You have to remember that you're a Westerner born and bred, my dear. A very Westerner yourself!”
“Birth is an accident—birthplaces, I mean,” smiled Terence. “It's the blood that tells.”
“Terry, you're a snob!” exclaimed Aunt Elizabeth.
“I hope not,” he answered. “But look yonder, now!”
Old George Armstrong's daughter, Nelly, had gone up a tree like a squirrel and was laughing down through the branches at a raw-boned cousin on the ground beneath her.
“And what of it?” said Elizabeth. “That girl is pretty enough to please any man; and she's the type that makes a wife.”
Terry rubbed his chin with his knuckles thoughtfully. It was the one family habit that he had contracted from Vance, much to the irritation of the latter.
“After all,” said Terry, with complacency, “what are good looks with bad grammar?”
Elizabeth snorted literally and most unfemininely.
“Terence,” she said, lessoning him with her bony, long forefinger, “you're just young enough to be wise about women. When you're a little older, you'll get sense. If you want white hands and good grammar, how do you expect to find a wife in the mountains?”
Terry answered with unshaken, lordly calm. “I haven't thought about the details. They don't matter. But a man must have standards of criticism.”
“Standards your foot!” cried Aunt Elizabeth. “You insufferable young prig. That very girl laughing down through the branches—I'll wager she could set your head spinning in ten seconds if she thought it worth her while to try.”
“Perhaps,” smiled Terence. “In the meantime she has freckles and a vocabulary without growing pains.”
“All men are fools,” declared Aunt Elizabeth; “but boys are idiots, bless 'em! Terence, before you grow up you'll have sore toes from stumbling, take my word for it! Do you know what a wise man would do?”
“Well?”
“Go out and start a terrific flirtation with Nelly.”
“For the sake of experience?” sighed Terence.
“Good heavens!” groaned Aunt Elizabeth. “Terry, you're impossible! Where are you going now?”
“Out to see El Sangre.”
He went whistling out of the door, and she followed him with confused feelings of anger, pride, joy, and fear. She went to a side window and saw him go fearlessly into the corral where the man-destroying El Sangre was kept. And the big stallion, red fire in the sunshine, went straight to him and nosed at a hip pocket. They had already struck up a perfect understanding. Deeply she wondered at it.
She had never loved the mountains and their people and their ways. It had been a battle to fight. She had fought the battle, won, and gained a hollow victory. And watching Terry caress the great, beautiful horse, she knew vaguely that his heart, at least, was in tune with the wilderness.
“I wish to heaven, Terry,” she murmured, “that you could find a master as El Sangre has done. You need teaching.”
When she turned from the window, she found Vance watching her. He had a habit of obscurely melting into a background and looking out at her unexpectedly. All at once she knew that he had been there listening during all of her talk with Terence. Not that the talk had been of a peculiarly private nature, but it angered her. There was just a semblance of eavesdropping about the presence of Vance. For she knew that Terence unbosomed himself to her as he would do in the hearing of no other human being. However, she mastered her anger and smiled at her brother. He had taken all these recent changes which were so much to his disadvantage with a good spirit that astonished and touched her.
“Do you know what I'm going to give Terry for his birthday?” he said, sauntering toward her.
“Well?” A mention of Terence and his welfare always disarmed her completely. She opened her eyes and her heart and smiled at her brother.
“There's no set of Scott in the house. I'm going to give Terry one.”
“Do you think he'll ever read the novels? I never could. That antiquated style, Vance, keeps me at arm's length.”
“A stiff style because he wrote so rapidly. But there's the greatest body and bone of character. Except for his heroes. Terry reminds me of them, in a way. No thought, not very much feeling, but a great capacity for physical action.”
“I think you'd like to be Terry's adviser,” she said.
“I wouldn't aspire to the job,” yawned Vance, “unless I could ride well and shoot well. If a man can't do that, he ceases to be a man in Terry's eyes. And if a woman can't talk pure English, she isn't a woman.”
“That's because he's young,” said Elizabeth.
