bolting straight
through the group of riders and careening away across the level, with
Bill and Tex tearing after her. Presently they slowed, and later Bill was
seen to lag behind. Tex and Mary V kept straight on, a furlong in advance
of the others.

The road swung away to the right, to avoid a rough stretch of rocks and
gullies, and Sudden perforce followed it, feelingly speaking his mind
upon the subjects of spoiled daughters and good-for-nothing employees,
and horses and the men that bestrode them, and Fords, and the roads of
Arizona, and the curse of being too well fed and growing a paunch that
made riding a martyrdom. He would put that girl in a convent, and he
would see that she stayed there till she was old enough to have some
sense. He would have that young hound at Sinkhole arrested as an
accomplice of the horse thieves. He would put a bullet through that fool
of a horse, Jake, and he would lynch Tex if he ever got his hands on him.
He would sell out, by glory, and buy himself a prune orchard.

And then he had a blow-out while he was down in a hollow a mile from the
outfit. And some darned fool had lost the handle to the jack, and the
best of the two extra tires was a darn poor excuse and wouldn't last a
mile, probably, and he got hold of a tube that had a leaky valve, and had
to hunt out another one after he had worked half an hour trying to pump
up the first one. And what in the blinkety blink did any darn fool want
to live in such a country for, anyway?

Thus it happened that Mary V was not forbidden to ride with Tex. And, not
being forbidden, Mary V carried out her own ideas of diplomacy and tact.
Her idea was to make Tex believe that she liked him better than the other
boys. Just what she would gain by that, Mary V did not stop to wonder. It
was the approved form of diplomacy, employed by all the leading heroines
of ancient and modern fiction and of film drama, and was warranted to
produce results in the way of information, guilty secrets, stolen wills,
plots and plans and papers.

Tex was inclined to eye her askance, just at first. He was also very
curious about her riding Jake, and he seemed inquisitive about whether
that was the first time she had ever ridden him. He was, too, very
absent-minded at times, and would go off into vacant-eyed reveries that
sealed his ears against her artfully artless chatter.

Some girls would have been discouraged. Mary V was merely stimulated to
further efforts. Tex