invited his confidence and dismissed his qualms.

"I was looking for the boss, ma'am."

"I'm the boss." She spoke encouragingly, as to some timid creature,
bending to brush off the milk that the stubborn calf had shaken from its
muzzle over her skirt.

"My partner and I are strangers here--he's over there at the
gate--passing through the country, and wanted your permission to look
around the place a little. They told us about it down at Glendora."

The animation of her face was clouded instantly as by a shadow of
disappointment. She turned her head as if to hide this from his eyes,
answering carelessly, a little pettishly:

"Go ahead; look around till you're tired."

Lambert hesitated, knowing very well that he had raised expectations
which he was in no present mind to fill. She must be sorely in need of
help when she would brighten up that way at the mere sight of a common
creature like a cow-puncher. He hated to take away what he had seemed to
come there offering, what he had, in all earnestness, come to offer.

But she was not the girl. He had followed a false lure that his own
unbridled imagination had lit. The only thing to do was back out of it
as gracefully as he could, and the poor excuse of "looking around" was
the best one he could lay his hand to in a hurry.

"Thank you," said he, rather emptily.

She did not reply, but bent again to her task of teaching the little
black calf to take its breakfast out of the pail instead of the fashion
in which nature intended it to refresh itself. Lambert backed off a
little, for the way of the range had indeed become his way in that year
of his apprenticeship, and its crudities were over him painfully. When
off what he considered a respectful distance he put on his hat, turning
a look at her as if to further assure her that his invasion of her
premises was not a trespass.

She gave him no further notice, engrossed as she appeared to be with the
calf, but when he reached the gate and looked back, he saw her standing
straight, the bucket at her feet, looking after him as if she resented
the fact that two free-footed men should come there and flaunt their
leisure before her in the hour of her need.

Taterleg was looking over the gate, trying to bring himself into the
range of her eyes. He swept off his hat when she looked that way, to be
rewarded by an immediate presentation of her back. Such cow-punchers as
these were altogether too fine and grand in their indepe