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Updated: May 23, 2025
In each succeeding hour of the long summer day the edges of the chasm of the years drew closer together; and when, in the afternoon, his father put him on a horse and rode with him to a corner of the vast home domain, a corner fenced off by sentinel cottonwoods and watered by the single small irrigation ditch of his childish recollections; rode with him through the screening cottonwoods and showed him, lying beyond them, the old ranch buildings of the "Circle-Bar," untouched and undisturbed; his heart was full and a sudden mist came before his eyes to dim the picture.
Now all the influences of this red-letter day had been humanizing, and when Evan Blount remembered the preservation of the old "Circle-Bar" ranch-house, and the motive which had prompted it, he told his brief love-tale, hiding nothing not even the hope that in the years to come Patricia might possibly find her career sufficiently unsatisfying to admit the thin edge of some wedge of reconsideration.
"There's never been a man hung by law in this county yet," a voice cried angrily and impatiently. "That ain't saying there never will be," Lauman flung back. "Don't yuh worry, they'll get all that's coming to them, all right." "How about the time yuh had 'em in your rotten old jail, and let 'em get out and run loose around the country, killing off white men?" drawled another-a Circle-Bar man.
And half-way between Painted Hat and the "Circle-Bar," nestling in the hollowed hands of the mountains, were the horse-corrals of one Debbleby, a true hermit of the hills, and the boy Evan's earliest school-master in the great book of Nature. Blount's one meliorating softness during the years of exile had manifested itself in an effort to keep track of Debbleby.
"Perhaps I didn't tell more because there was so little to tell. I had a boyhood like other boys or, no, possibly it wasn't quite the usual. I was born on the 'Circle-Bar, when the ranch was as it still is, I believe a hard day's drive for a bunch of prime steers distant from the nearest shipping-corral on the railroad.
"Why?" "There are a lot of fellows in this part of the country who don't like Billy, and some of them are liable to tread on his feet." "Oh, is he quarrelsome?" "No, Billy is the best sort of a fellow, but he won't let any one hobble him. When he first went to the Dumb-bell Ranch, as the Circle-bar Circle is called, they took him for a kid and tried to run over him.
Then: "And pretty soon your father married again?" "Not for some years," Blount qualified. "But for me the heavens were fallen. I was sent away to school, to college, to Europe; then I came here to the Law School. In all that time I've never seen the 'Circle-Bar' or my native State in fact, I have never been west of Chicago." Gantry was astonished and he admitted it in exclamatory phrase.
It was amply evident that the simple life which had been the rule of the "Circle-Bar" ranch household had become a thing of the past; and though he charged the new order of things to the ambition of his father's wife, he could hardly cavil at it, since he was himself a sharer in the comforts and luxuries.
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