The Huttig news., 1917-03-10

motherleSs Texas girl had grown into an imaginative. sentimental person, liy- ing in q make-believe world, peopled, for the most part, with the best remembered figures of romance and fiction. There were. of course. some few flesh-and-blood heroes among the rest, and of these the finest and the noblest had been Young Ed" Austin.
 When she came home to marry, Alaire wasSstill very much of child, aud she still considered Ed her knight. As for him, he was captivated by this splendid, handsome girl, whom he re- membered only as a shy, fed-headed little comrade.
 As Las Palnas had been the elder Austin's wedding gift to his son, so Alaire's dowry from her father had been La Feria, grant of lands across the Rio Grande beyond the twenty iaague belt by which Mexico fatuously strives to guard her border. And to Las Palmas had come the bride and groom to live. to love and to rear their children.
 But rarely has there been A shorter honeymoon. seldom swifter awaken ing. Within six months Young Ed" had killed his wife's love and had him. self became an alcoholic. Other vices so multiplied that what few virtues the young man had inherited were soon choked. To the bride the truth had come as stunning tragedy. The wreck of her hopes and glad imagin- ings left her sick, bewildered, in the face of ''the thing that couldn't"
 Nor had the effect of this transfor- nation in Young Ed" been any less painful to his father. When the truth wnS borne in upon him unmistakably, aud the girl-wfe remained firm in her refusal to divorce her husband, the un- derstanding had been. reached, by which the management of Las Palmas was placed absolutely in her hands.
 Of course the truth became public, as it always does. "Young Ed" Aus tins life became a scorn and a missing among his neighbors. They were not unduly fastidious, these neighbors, and they knew that hot blood requires more than a generation tG cool. but every thing Ed did outraged them. In trying to show their sympathy for his wife they succeeded in wounding her more deeply. and Alaire withdrew into her self She had changed. The alteration reached to the very bone and marrow of her being. At first the general pity had wounded her. then it had offended and finally angered her. That people should notice her affiiction. particu- larly when she stroye so desperately to hide it, seemed the height of inso- lence.
 The management of Las Palmas was almost her only relief. Having sprung from a family of ranchers, the work came easy, and she grew to like it-as well as she could like anything with that everpresent pain in her breast Las Palmas had prospered to admira ton, and La Feria would have pros pered equally had it not been for tht armed unrest of the country across the border. No finer stock than the Box \" was to be found anywhere. But l Alalre had not confined her efforts tc cattle; she had improved the breed o1 BOX AZ horses, too, and hand Tn hand with this work she had carried on a series of agricultural experiments. For instance. she had started grove of paper-shelled oceans, which was soon due to bear; the ranchhouse and its clump of palms was all but hidden by q forest of strange trees, which were reported to ripen everything from mothhalls to bicycle tires. Blaze Jones was perhaps responsible for this re- port, for Alaire had shown him sev- eral thousand eucalyptus saplings and some ornamental rubber plants
 That Mig Austin is money-makin' piece of furniture" he once told his daughter Paloma. "I'm no mechanical adder-I count mostly on my fingers but her and me calculated the profits on them eucher what's their name trees ?-and it gave me q splittin' head ache. She'll be a drug queen, sure."
 "Why don't you follow her exam ple?" asked Paloma. "We have plenty of land.'
 bldHc, III ifutI, WaS pI1DaFFHSSpu DN the size of his holdings. but he shook his head. "No, Pm too old to go ram- pagin' after new gods. I ain't got the imagination to raise anything more complicated than a mortgage; but if I was younger. I'd organize myself up and do away with that Ed Austin. I'd sure help him to an untimely end, and then I'd marry them pecan groves, and blooded herds, and drugstore orchards. She certainly is heart-breakin' de- vice, with her red hair and red lips an
 'Father!' Palome was deeply shocked.
 
 Complete isolation, of course, Alaire had found to be impossible. even though her ranch lay far from the trav- eled roads and her Mexican guards were not encouraging to visitors. Busi- ness inevitably brought her into con- tact with a considerable numher of