“Just like a woman, Evangeline, just like a woman!” Mr. Wheeler replied indulgently. He was sitting in the full glare of the acetylene lamp, his neckband open, his collar and tie on the table beside him, fanning himself with a palm-leaf fan. “You might as well ask me why I want to make more money, when I haven’t spent all I’ve got.”
He intended, he said, to put Ralph on the Colorado ranch and “give the boy some responsibility.” Ralph would have the help of Wested’s foreman, an old hand in the cattle business, who had agreed to stay on under the new management. Mr. Wheeler assured his wife that he wasn’t taking advantage of poor Wested; the timber on the Maine place was really worth a good deal of money; but because his father had always been so proud of his great pine woods, he had never,
