rowbridge reined in his horse and meditated, when he and
Dorothy had covered several miles of their ride back to Crawling Water.
"Jensen was shot around here somewhere, wasn't he?"

"I think it was over there." She pointed with her quirt in the direction
of a distant clump of jack-pines. "Why?"

"Suppose we ride over and take a look at the spot." He smiled at her
little shudder of repugnance. "We haven't any Sherlock Holmes in this
country, and maybe we need one. I'll have a try at it. Come on!"

In response to the pressure of his knees, the trained cow-pony whirled
toward the jack-pines, and Dorothy followed, laughing at the idea that
so ingenuous a man as Lem Trowbridge might possess the analytical gift
of the trained detective.

"You!" she said mockingly, when she had caught up with him. "You're as
transparent as glass; not that it isn't nice to be that way, but still
you are. Besides, the rain we've had must have washed all tracks away."

"No doubt, but we'll have a look anyhow. It won't do any harm.
Seriously, though, the ways of criminals have always interested me. I'd
rather read a good detective story than any other sort of yarn."

"I shouldn't think that you had any gift that way."

"That's got nothing to do with it," he laughed. "It's always like that.
Haven't you noticed how nearly every man thinks he's missed his calling;
that if he'd only gone in for something else he'd have been a rattling
genius at it? Just to show you! I've got a hand over at the ranch, a
fellow named Barry, who can tie down a steer in pretty close to the
record. He's a born cowman, if I ever saw one, but do you suppose he
thinks that's his line?"

"Doesn't he?" she asked politely. One of the secrets of her popularity
lay in her willingness to feed a story along with deft little
interjections of interest.

"He does not. Poetry! Shakespeare! That's his 'forty'! At night he gets
out a book and reads Hamlet to the rest of the boys. Thinks that if he'd
ever hit Broadway with a show, he'd set the town on fire."

When Dorothy laughed heartily, as she now did, the sound of it was worth
going miles to hear. There are all shades of temperament and character
in laughter, which is the one thing of which we are least
self-conscious; hers revealed not only a sense of humor, rare in her
sex, but a blithe, happy nature, which made allies at once of those upon
whose ears her merriment fell. Trowbridge's eyes sparkled with his
appreciation of