Blake was not in bad condition, considering the circumstances, nor was the baby. It was a girl, whom Jim named Lucy right then and there, after his wife.

The men carried the mother and her babe up to the house, while Mrs. Smith followed with the now sleepy Pan. They built fires in the open grate, and in the kitchen stove, and left Mrs. Smith to attend to the mother. Both women heard the men talking. But Pan never heard, for he had been put to bed in a corner, rolled in blankets.

"Doggone my hide!" exclaimed Bill. "Never seen the beat of that kid of mine!"

"Mebbe Pan saved both their lives, God bless him," replied Blake with emotion.

"Quien sabe? It might be.... Wal, strange things happen. Jim, that kid of mine was born right out on the plowed field. An' here comes your kid—born in the cowshed on the hay!"

"It is strange," mused Blake, "though we ought to look for such happenin's out in this great west."

"Wal, Pan an' Lucy couldn't have a better birthright. It ought to settle them two kids for life."

"You mean grow up an' marry some day? Now that would be fine. Shake on it, Bill."

Pan asleep in the corner of the other room and Lucy wailing at her mother's breast were pledged to each other by their fathers.

The winter passed for Pan much as had the preceding one, except that he had more comfort to play his everlasting game of roundup.

"When will Lucy be big enough to play with me?" he often asked. The strange little baby girl had never passed from his mind, though he had never seen her. She seemed to form the third link in his memory of the forging of his life. Curly—the cowboys—and Lucy! He did not know how to reconcile her with the other two. But those three events stood out above the blur of the past.

At last the snow melted, the prairie took on a sheen of green, the tree burst into bud, and birds returned to sing once more. All of this was beautiful, but insignificant beside Curly. He was fatter and friskier than ever.

Pan's father came home once or twice a month that spring, always arriving late and leaving at an early hour. How Pan longed for his father's coming!

Then there came the fourth epoch in Pan's life. His father brought him a saddle. It was far from new, of Mexican make, covered with rawhide, and had an enormous shiny horn. Pan loved it almost as much as he loved Curly; and when it was not on the pony it adorned the fence or a chair, always with Pan astride it, acting like Tex.

The fifth, and surely the greatest event in Pan's rapidly developing career, though he did not know it then, was when his mother took him over to see his baby, Lucy Blake. It appeared that the parents in both homesteads playfully called her "Pan's baby." That did not displease Pan, but it made him singularly shy. So it was long before his mother could get him to make the acquaintance of his protégée.

Pan's first sight of Lucy was when she crawled over the floor to get to him. How vastly different she really was from the picture he recalled of a moving bundle wrapped in a towel! She was quite big and very wonderful. She was dressed in a little white dress. Her feet and legs were chubby. She had tiny pink hands. Her face was like a wild rose dotted with two violets for eyes.