Chapter XVI. For Once at Least Lite Had His Way

Half a mile she galloped, and met Lite coming home. She glanced over her shoulder before she pulled Pard down to a walk, and Lite's greeting, as he turned and rode alongside her, was a question. He wanted to know what was the matter with her. He listened with his old manner of repression while she told him, and he made no comment whatever until she had finished.

"You must have made him pretty sore," he said dispassionately. "I don't think myself that you ought to stay over to the ranch alone. Why don't you do as he says?"

"And go back to the Bar Nothing?" Jean shivered a little. "Nothing could make me go back there! Lite, you don't understand. He acted like a crazy man; and I hadn't said anything to stir him up like that. He was--Lite, he scared me! I couldn't stay on the ranch with him. I couldn't be in the same room with him."

"You can't go on staying at the Lazy A," Lite told her flatly.

"There's no other place where I'd stay."

"You could," Lite pointed out, "stay in town and go back and forth with the rest of the bunch. It would be a lot better, any way you look at it."

"It would be a lot worse. There's my book; I wouldn't have any chance to write on that. And there's the expense. I'm saving every nickel I possibly can, Lite, and you know what for. And there's the bunch--I see enough of them during working hours. I'd go crazy if I had to live with them. Lite, they've put me in playing leads! I'm to get a hundred dollars a week! Just think of that! And Burns says that I'll have to go back to Los Angeles with them when they go this fall, because the contract I signed lasts for a year."

She sighed. "I rode over to tell you about it. It seemed to be good news, when I left home. But now, it's just a part of the black tangle that life's made up of. Aunt Ella started things off by telling me what a disgrace it is for me to work in these pictures. And Uncle Carl--" She shivered in spite of herself. "I just can't understand Uncle Carl's going into such a rage. It was--awful."

Lite rode for some distance before he lifted his head or spoke. Then he looked at Jean, who was staring straight ahead and seeing nothing save what her thoughts pictured.

He did not say a word about her going to Los Angeles.

He was the bottled-up type; the things that hit him hardest he seldom mentioned, so by that rule it might be inferred that her going hit hard. But his voice was normally calm, and his tone was the tone of authority, which Jean knew very well, and which nearly always amused her because she firmly believed it to be utterly useless.

He said in the tone of an ultimatum: "If you're bound to stay at the ranch, you've got to have somebody with you. I'll ride in and get Hepsy Atwood in the morning. You're getting thin. I don't believe