Ralph Stock

“ Strode agreed, and, with an occasional visit from his boss, had run the winter camp for six months now without apparent ill-effect. In fact, he rather liked the life. To bring in the calves, fasten the corral gate, and sit before a red-hot box-stove while a north-west blizzard beat its tattoo on the tiny window pane, afforded him quiet satisfaction. ”

“ He's like that."
"He sounds a good sort to me," said Strode.
"Good?" The woman's eyes flashed. "Didn't I tell you he's the best ever? He's a man. Troubles piled in on him like a snow-slide—troubles that I saw coming a mile, and figured out how to avoid. But he didn't avoid them. Didn't seem to want to. He just met them with that grin of his and butted his way through. I've never seen him down and out. Don't believe anyone or anything could put him that way. He's too strong—self-reliant. He made me ashamed of the way I felt about his work. ”

“ There was a wedding ring on her finger; that was all he could fathom about her until he came in from feeding the calves the next morning. She was up then, cooking the breakfast, and it was while she was making the tea that he noticed her wedding ring had gone.
"I've got to thank you," she began.
"Please don't," said Strode.
"All right," she agreed. "You'd do as much for a dog, anyway. My name's Mellor—Edith Mellor. D'you want the rest?"
"Not unless you care to give it me, Mrs. Mellor."
She coloured and glanced involuntarily at her hand.
"You're pretty quick—for a man," she observed. ”

“ The man with the brown-paper face proved to be Ben Hammond, owner of the Z-X, one of those small cattle ranches in the Bad Lands not yet ousted by the encroaching and hated farmer. Here, for two months of glorious Indian summer, Strode had gone quietly and thoroughly to work *at whatever came his way, and when Winter shut down her icy lid with a snap, and the other "hands" had been paid off, Ben Hammond had something to say, and said it in his usual concise fashion:
"You're a quiet kind of guy." ”

“ I tell you the prairie's hard on a woman—hard."
"'For better or worse,' you know," Strode reminded him.
"Oh, it's all right for us to talk that way," objected the other. "We've got our work. It's queer the grip it gets on us, too. We begin to think we're really doing something. It's all I know—how to work, and what's it done but lose me all I was working for?"
"Me?" The man leant back in the chair with his legs asprawl and a bitter smile on his lips. "I've got a few bottles up at the shack. ”

“ But, as Ben Hammond explained, it was better business from the Z-X point of view to collect a hard-working, fifty-dollar-a-month lunatic, when Spring came round, than a pair of normal, twenty-dollar "do-nothings" who had scamped their work through fighting over it—as they invariably did. ”