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eyes of Peter flick over the yard and toward the house and he steeled himself to hear the remark that must surely be forthcoming.
    But it did not come. One would have said that Peter did not even see that the yard had been denuded of trees. They had all gone the winter before. There had been nothing else to sell, and they had brought in a good, fat price, together with a stiff winter task for him. That money had seen Peter through one crisis of the college career.
    However, here was the team going on towardthe barn. And there was Peter sitting in the front seat—his son, his treasure, the reward of all of his labors. Ross tipped back his big head, and his laughter was good neither to see nor to hear.
    The horses were soon unharnessed, and he noticed that Peter, for his part, managed with a singular adroitness to handle his wrecked body, standing about and working so fast with his hands that he was able to do a full half of the unharnessing and of the tending to the horses afterward.
    It gave the father a cruelly sad pleasure to see it. He had not thought to bring back his boy to such labors as these. But now he saw before him the complete wreckage of all his hopes. They came out from the barn. One would have thought that big Peter’s eyes had been ruined no less than his legs. One would have thought that he had seen nothing of the poverty that appeared in the mow of that barn, where not two hundredweight of moldy hay littered the floor; that he had been unable to discover the sagging state of the roof, or the loft door hanging from a single broken hinge.
    What the barn was, the entire estate had become; it was a burned cinder of a ranch. All that had once been prosperous had gone to the nurturing of Peter. And what return would he make? Well, that was yet to be learned, for there were ways in which money could be made, and it was true that many a man had been able to pile up a fortune despite worse handicaps than the crippled body of Peter. Yet there was little hope in the soul of Peter’s father.
    When they stood in the welcome brightness of the sun outside the shadowy interior of the barn, a crow lighted on the watering trough and cried atthem. And the despair and the rage that had been growing greater and greater in the heart of Ross Hale now burst out in a childish spite. He snatched out his Colt and blazed away. Both shots went wide—one that startled the crow up into the air, and the other as he rose into the wind.
    But as Hale lowered his weapon, the strong hand of Peter reached for it and took it. The crow had risen well into the wind and now was flying for the safety beyond the roof of the barn. Peter fired at that black streak.
    The crow sagged sidewise and dropped half a dozen yards, shrieking a bitter protest. Then it drove onward once more, but before it reached the barn, the gun spoke again. The black fellow tumbled in silence out of the sky and bumped heavily upon the ground.
    Ross Hale observed, and, although he said nothing as he took back his gun, he was keenly conscious of the matter-of-fact expression on the face of Peter.
    “That gat of mine bears to the right,” said Ross Hale as they went toward the house, across the corral.
    “It bears to the right,” said Peter. “That’s why I winged him on the right side, I suppose.”
    “You’ve been trying your hand at shooting, then?” asked the rancher.
    “A man has to do something for amusement, you know. And I had no chance at the other sports,” said Peter. “So I got me some medals in the rifle and revolver teams.” And he smiled, without bitterness, and straight into the eyes of Ross Hale.

Chapter Seven
    Sometimes it requires only a small thing to make us revise our mental estimates of men and events. It seemed to the rancher, now, that there might be cause in this mere bit of target work to alter his first judgment. But he decided that he would make himself more cheerful. He would talk to his boy of all that he could. Since there were