CHAPTER IV
BERTHA WEDEKIND
"Well, Tom, I am glad to see you!" Mrs. Wedekind, small, delicate, white-haired, with something about her reminiscent of old lace and lavender, beamed upon him through her gold-rimmed spectacles. "And rich, aren’t you?"
Tom Graves felt slightly embarrassed. References to the lucky strike in the Yankee Doodle Glory and his suddenly acquired wealth often made him curiously ill at case as if it were a reflection, quite undeserved, on his character and his manliness.
So he smiled vaguely and apologetically and shook her hand without knowing what to reply, while Martin Wedekind, guessing what was going on in the young Westerner's mind, came to the rescue.
"Yes, Fanny," he said to his wife. "Who would have believed last year that the Killicott ranch harbored a prospective capitalist?" He turned to Tom and led him to the sideboard with its hospitable array of bottles and glasses and syphons. "Shall I mix you one in honor of the occasion?"
But Tom Graves was not listening, for Bertha Wedekind had come into the dining-room, an exquisite little figure with her wheat-colored hair that rippled over the broad, smooth, low forehead in a curly, untamable mass, her violet-blue eyes, her pure oval of a face, pink and white and flower-soft. Her youth-
