Dusting a chair with her apron and placing it before the master, she continued maternally, "Now that you're here, set ye right down and make yourself to home.

My men folks are all out o' door, but some of 'em's sure to happen in soon for suthin'; that day ain't yet created that they don't come huntin' up Mammy McKinstry every five minutes for this thing or that." The glow of a certain hard pride burned through the careworn languor of her brown cheek.

What she had said was strangely true.

This raw-boned woman before him, although scarcely middle-aged, had for years occupied a self-imposed maternal and protecting relation, not only to her husband and brothers, but to the three or four men, who as partners, or hired hands, lived at the ranch.

An inherited and trained sympathy with what she called her "boys's" and her "men folk," and their needs had partly unsexed her.