kin' without
her speakin' a word."

"I have known people like that," said Patches, probably because there
was so little that he could say.

"Yes, an' when you know Kitty, you'll say, like I always have, that if
there's a man in Yavapai County that wouldn't ride the hoofs off the
best horse in his outfit, night or day, to win a smile from her, he
ought to be lynched."

That afternoon in Prescott they purchased an outfit for Patches, and the
following day set out for the long return drive to the ranch.

They had reached the top of the hill at the western end of the meadow
lane, when they saw a young woman, on a black horse, riding away from
the gate that opens from the lane into the Pot-Hook-S meadow pasture,
toward the ranch buildings on the farther side of the field.

As they drove into the yard at home, it was nearly supper time, and the
men were coming from the corrals.

"Kitty's been over all the afternoon," Little Billy informed them
promptly. "I told her all about you, Patches. She says she's just dyin'
to see you."

Phil joined in the laugh, but Patches fancied that there was a shadow in
the cowboy's usually sunny eyes as the young man looked at him to say,
"That big horse of yours sure made me ride some to-day."

CHAPTER VI.

THE DRIFT FENCE.

The education of Honorable Patches was begun without further delay.
Because Phil's time was so fully occupied with his four-footed pupils,
the Dean himself became the stranger's teacher, and all sorts of odd
jobs about the ranch, from cleaning the pig pen to weeding the garden,
were the text books. The man balked at nothing. Indeed, he seemed to
find a curious, grim satisfaction in accomplishing the most menial and
disagreeable tasks; and when he made mistakes, as he often did, he
laughed at himself with such bitter, mocking humor that the Dean
wondered.

"He's got me beat," the Dean confided to Stella. "There ain't nothin'
that he won't tackle, an' I'm satisfied that the man never did a stroke
of work before in his life. But he seems to be always tryin' experiments
with himself, like he expected himself to play the fool one way or
another, an' wanted to see if he would, an' then when he don't he's as
surprised and tickled as a kid."

The Dean himself was not at all above assisting his new man in those
experiments, and so it happened that day when Patches had been set to
repairing the meadow pasture fence near the lower corrals.

The Dean, riding o