ome to borrow one, two matches, senor, if you have to spare," he said
glibly. "Me, I'm riding past this way, and stop for my horse to drink.
She's awful hot to-day--yes?"

Johnny gave him the matches, made what replies were needful, and stood in
the doorway watching the fellow ride to the creek and afterwards proceed
to eliminate himself from the landscape. Mary V leaned sidewise so that
she too could watch him from where she sat at the table. She was sure,
when she saw him ride off, that he was the same man who had met Tex away
back there in the arroyo.

She watched Johnny, wondering if he knew the man, or knew what was his
real reason for coming. Whatever his real reason was, he had gone off
without stating it, and Mary V believed that he had gone because she was
there. She wished she knew why he had come, but she would not ask Johnny.
She merely watched him covertly.

Johnny had turned thoughtful. He did not even see that Mary V was
watching him, he was so busy wishing that she had not come at all, or
that she had gone before this man rode up. Inwardly Johnny was all
a-quiver with excitement. He believed that he knew why Tomaso's brother
had come.

CHAPTER SIX

SALVAGE

The brother of Tomaso came back. Mary V, cannily watching the wide waste
behind her as she rode homeward, saw him and made sure of him through her
glasses. The brother of Tomaso seemed to be in a hurry, and he seemed to
have been waiting in some convenient covert until she had left. His horse
was trotting too nimbly through the sage to have come far at that pace.
Mary V could tell a tired horse as far as she could tell that it was a
horse.

She did not turn back, for the simple reason that she knew very well her
mother would have all the boys out hunting her if she failed to reach
home by sundown. That would have meant deep humiliation for Mary V and
a curtailment of future freedom. So she put up her glasses and went her
way, talking to herself by way of comforting her thwarted curiosity, and
accusing Johnny Jewel of all sorts of intrigues; and never dreaming the
truth, of course.

"Me, I'm willing to sell, all right. What you pay me?" Tomaso's brother
was sitting in Johnny's doorway where he could watch the trail, and he
was smoking a cigarette made with Johnny's tobacco.

"She's no good to nobody, setting there in the sand, but she's all right,
you bet, for fly. Them fellers, they get lost, I think. They get away off
there, and n