-and stepped
inside.

It was very quiet. It was so quiet that Mary V held her breath and was
tempted to turn and run away. She waited for a minute, her nostrils
widened to the pent odor of stale cigarette smoke that clings to a
bachelor's cabin in warm weather. She tiptoed across the room to where
Johnny's cot stood and timidly passed her hands above the covers.
Emboldened by its flat emptiness, Mary V turned and felt along the window
ledge where she had seen that Johnny kept his matches, found the box, and
lighted a match.

The flare showed her the empty room. Oddly, she stared at the telephone
as though she expected it to reveal something. Some one had stood there
and had talked with her. And Johnny was not at camp at all; had not been,
since--

With a truly feminine instinct she turned to the crude cupboard and
looked in. She inspected a dish of brown beans, sniffed and wrinkled her
nose. They were sour, and the ones on top were dried with long standing.
Johnny's biscuits, on a tin plate, were hard and dry. Not a thing in that
cupboard looked as though it had been cooked later than two or three days
before.

A reaction of rage seized Mary V. She went out, tied the door shut with
two spitefully hard-drawn knots, mounted Jake without a thought of his
height or his dancing accomplishments, and headed for home at a gallop.

She hated Johnny Jewel every step of the way. I suppose it is
exasperating to ride a forbidden, treasured horse on a forbidden,
possibly dangerous night journey to rescue a man from some unknown peril,
and discover that the young man is not at hand to be rescued. Mary V
seemed to find it so. She decided that Johnny Jewel was up to some
devilment, and had probably hired that man to answer the 'phone for him
so her dad would not know he was gone. He thought he was very clever, of
course--putting the man up to pretending he had a cold, just to fool her
dad. Well, he had fooled her dad, all right, but there happened to be a
person on the ranch he could not fool. That person _hoped_ she was
smarter than Johnny Jewel, and to prove it she would find out what it was
he was trying to be so secret about. And then she would confront him with
the proof, and then where would he be?

She certainly owed it to the outfit--to her dad--to find out what was
going on. There was no use, she told herself virtuously, in worrying her
dad about it until she knew just exactly what that miserable Johnny Jewel
was up to.