"That 's just it," Nick replied. "I don't care for that kind of a friend; but Bob just takes it for granted that I think he's my longlost brother and pretty soon I'm thinking that he is. You can't overlook Bob or snub him even though there is n't much of anything to him. Now there's a lot to you,don't bother to bow, I may be saying that just for effect, but you keep it so tightly shut up inside of yourself that nobody gets any benefit from it."

"I don't owe the fellows anything," said Foster.

Nick reached for another peppermint.

"I'm not so sure of that," he said slowly. "That Satanic old thing they call geometryyou 've heard of it, have n't you?-used to say that the whole is greater than any of its parts. Maybe it is. But a part of any school is the thing they call 'school spirit'—and it seems to me that school spirit is something that is bigger than the team, bigger than the fellows, bigger than the whole school."

He rolled the last peppermint onto the table, made a balloon of the bag, and burst it between his hands.

"Anyway, that 's how I feel," he went on. "It sounds silly, perhaps but I'd sacrifice a whole lot for that little blue pennant with the white 'L' on it. That little flag stands for all that the school has been and done in the past eighty years and that's a bigger thing, Foster, than you or I can hope to chisel out, playing it alone."

Foster sat very still for a long time.

"I don't like to admit it," he said slowly; "but I have n't felt comfortable since I left the team. I would n't put it into words, the way you have done, and face it squarely."

"I'm only giving you my idea," Nick said. "I may be wrong."

Foster shook his head slowly.

"I know-inside of me that you are right," he said.

There were only two more games-Middleton the next Saturday and the big game a week later. It seemed to Foster as if Bitmore ought to be willing to let him off for these two Saturdays.

But this hope was rudely blasted when he spoke to Bitmore.

"No, sir!" that man said promptly. "You can't slip away and then expect to come back again. You are n't the only fellow in town who can work. Mind made up? All right. I'm not sure but that Bolles will suit me better, anyway."

Bolles! If only it could have been some

other fellow who was to receive that six dollars a week!

That night, just before going to bed, Foster took the large magazine from the shelf and looked at the picture of the ocean again.

"Oh, well," he said at length, "I'll see it some time!"

Foster went back to the team quietly and without words, his mind made up to atone for his disloyalty. But the Middleton game was a keen disappointment. Lockwood played raggedly and barely won. The old smoothness was gone. The missing cog had been restored, but it no longer fitted perfectly.

As the week of the big game progressed, the practice disclosed little improvement. Still, the players and the school kept alive a faith that the team would "come back" in the game.

This faith was shaken when Ellington scored a touchdown in the first five minutes of play; it glowed again when Lockwood tied the score in the second quarter; and flamed into glorious brightness when Cowles, the full-back, kicked a pretty field-goal and put Lockwood ahead, ten to seven. But in the second half, Ellington ripped things to pieces and scored another touchdown, making the score fourteen to ten.

There it stood when, in the last quarter, Ellington got the ball near the center of the field and started for the Lockwood goal-line with a fury in her attack that seemed irresistible.

Desperately the Lockwood team fought to hold its ground and fought in vain. Foot by foot, what had once been the best Lockwood team in years was driven back toward the shadow of its own goal-posts.

Lone-steer Foster, fighting like a demon, glanced toward the stands where the blue banners waved loyally. He looked away again quickly.

The Ellington backs crashed through for eight yards. Tears sprang to Foster's eyes. He had been disloyal-and what he had done could not be undone he had wrecked the wonderful machine in which he had been a cog.

He suddenly felt tired. It was as if heavy weights hung from his shoes. He sensed the fact that his team-mates felt the same. They had lost their spirit.

And as Nick had said, the spirit was the biggest thing of all!

Suddenly he stiffened and dug his heels

moved, and Foster leaped forward with upstretched hands-to block that kick or die! The opposing tackle tried to stop himand failed. A mountain could not have stopped him.

Then, with that blinding vividness with which a man sees in the instant of a great crisis, Foster saw Hills, the Lockwood right end, just ahead of him; and near Hills, ready to force him out of the play, the crouching Ellington quarter-back.

There were two things that Foster could do: he could try to smother the kick himself, or he could charge into the Ellington quarterback and let Hills try to block the kick. And Hills was nearer Black than Foster was.

Foster did not hesitate. It was his moment of supreme sacrifice. He plunged against the crouching quarter-back-and gave Hills the chance to block the kick.

Foster lived through the next five minutes as a man lives in a dream. He heard the sharp thud of the kick-then a muffled thud near him. Vaguely he sensed that Hills had blocked the kick.

Then something struck the ground in front of him something dark and oval. Instinctively he reached for it-clasped it in his arms started forward toward the Ellington goal-line!

To himself, he did not seem to be moving,but the white lines flashed by his blurred vision. There were men just behind him. He could hear their fierce panting and the pounding of their feet on the ground.

They were gaining on him. He had never been much of a runner, anyway. He glanced up. There was not a man between him and the distant goal-line!

At that moment something broke loose in Foster's soul. He began to run like a wild man-faster and still faster!

He felt a sharp tug at his legs-then again he was running free!

Straight between the goal-posts he ranand touched the ball to the ground. A great roar was sounding in his ears the roar, it seemed, of that distant ocean which he had

never seen:

“Rah-rah,_rah-rah, rah-rahFoster! Foster! FOSTER!"

Then, suddenly, it came to him what it was the crashing Lockwood cheer, ripped out as never a Lockwood cheer had been heard in all the days that Lockwood teams had fought and won!

He walked unsteadily out on the field and watched Cowles kick the goal. And as the ball sailed straight and true between the goalposts, the shrill whistle sounded across the field.

The game was over! Lockwood had won at last!

From the blue stands, a wild mob began to pour out onto the field. It surrounded the members of the team, lifted them from the ground, and marched away with them.

And there, at the head of the procession, raised a little higher than the others upon the shoulders of his schoolmates, rose Lonesteer Foster!

Half an hour later, in the gym, that looked as if it had been struck by a cyclone, Nick came up to Foster.

"I'm master of ceremonies to-night," he said. "You are to make a speech."

“I—I can't," said Foster.

"You not only can you must," Nick replied. "This is official-and final.”

After a while Foster got away from the fellows and slipped away to the familiar lunch-room. He wanted to think quietly for a few minutes.

And there Bitmore found him.

"I'd get down on my knees," the efficiency man said, "only the floor does n't look very clean. Will you come back, sweetheart, oh, will you come back to me?"

Foster stared a bit. "I thought you had a good man," he said.

"I thought I had," Bitmore said. "This fellow Bolles is a funny proposition. He evidently gets away with it most of the time but not with your old Uncle Billy Bitmore. You 've got stuff in you-Bolles has n't. That's the whole story."

"You'd like to have me come back?" Foster asked.

"Don't use such language!" the man exclaimed. "I would n't like to have you back -but I would love to have you, I'd grovelI'd—”

"I'll come," said Foster, with a smile. "Can you come to-night?" Bitmore asked abruptly.

The roar of the distant ocean was in Foster's ears but there was a louder sound even than that the roar of that crashing cheer that had carried his name.

His smile deepened. He was thinking that he would be a "lone steer" no longer.

"No," he told Bitmore, "I can't come tonight-I 've got to make a speech to-night!"

CHAPTER I

GRAY CLOUD MOUNTAIN

It was with feelings of doubt that were not very far from dismay that Beatrice Deems watched her new acquaintance, Dan O'Leary, saddle her recently acquired horse. She had ridden before, of course, in the tan-bark ring of the riding-school or on shady bridle-paths in the park, always on well-broken steeds whose beauty and grooming were equaled only by their good manners. But now, as she stood in her short khaki riding-skirt and her high boots, waiting outside the great dilapidated shed that in this little Montana town did duty as a livery-stable, she was beginning to wonder whether she really knew anything at all about horses. Certainly, she had never thought of riding anything like this plunging creature, who stood straight up on his hind legs one moment, then dropped to his fore feet and stood on them in turn, with the ease of a circus performer.

She had spent only two days in Ely, the little town planted beside Broken Bow Creek, in the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains. At first she had thought that the village, with its scattered boxlike houses and dusty, shadeless street, was most unlike the West of the picture-books and the movies. The antics of her new horse, however, were disturbingly like what she had witnessed in Wild West shows.

"Name 's Buck," volunteered the man who was struggling with the saddle, and added, though in a tone that seemed to indicate the explanation as quite unnecessary, "It 's on account of his color, you know."

"Oh!" returned Beatrice, a little blankly. For the life of her she could think of nothing else to say. She had yet to learn that all Western ponies of that golden buckskin shade of coat bear the same name. At the moment she was tempted to believe that the title had something to do with the way in which the creature was humping his back like a gigantic cat and jumping up and down on his nimble white fore feet. Dan's shabbily overalled assistant, Sam, came and stood at the wide door of the stable, grinning respectfully, and watching the performance with interest.

"Your father went out on the range and chose the horse himself, when he was here

getting your house ready," he volunteered. "He could n't have found another one in the valley could go like Buck."

"Did he did he try him?" Beatrice wished to know.

Her feelings in the matter were oddly mixed, for she dreaded the moment when she must mount to the big unfamiliar saddle, and yet she was all on fire to test the horse's speed.

"No, he did n't try him," was Dan's answer; "he just said he wanted a safe horse for his daughter, liked the looks of this one,-and well he might, and said he knew an honest man when he saw one and would take my word for it that the horse would suit. There, now the saddle 's firm. You must n't think anything of the way he acts when you pull up the cinch-they all do that!"

For all her misgivings, Beatrice was no coward. She stepped forward, discovered in one violent second that a Western pony sets off the moment he feels the rider's weight on the stirrup, then flung herself, somehow, into the saddle and was away.

"I did not do that very well," she was thinking, "another time Oh, oh!"

For her very thought was interrupted by the sudden rush of wordless delight as the horse beneath her stretched himself to that long easy lope that is like nothing else in the world. The fresh mountain wind, sweeping down from the clean, high peaks above, sang in her ears, the stony road swung past below. The motion was as easy as a rocking-chair, but seemed as swift as thought itself. Motoring she had always loved, but she confessed with sudden disloyalty that it was a bumpy business compared to the measured swaying of this living creature between her knees. Buck's personal prejudices seemed indeed to be directed solely against the cinching of the saddle; that process once over, he was as eager and happy as she to clatter across the bridge, pass the last of the ugly little houses and the high-fronted store buildings, and turn his white blazed face toward the mounting trail that led out of the valley.

Beatrice drew rein when they had breasted the first rise and paused a moment to look back. The houses strewed haphazard across the slope below her made more of a town than she had thought. There was the pack