es late," the agent volunteered, thrusting his head
through the open window. "Looking for friends, boys?"

"Andy is," Pink informed him cheerfully. "The rest of us are just
hanging around through sympathy. It's his girl coming."

"Well, I guess he thinks he needs a housekeeper now," the agent grinned.
"Why don't you fellows get busy now and rustle some cooks?"

"Girls don't like to cook over a camp-fire," Cal Emmett told him
soberly. "We kinda thought we ought to build our shacks first."

"You can pick you out some when the train gets in," said the agent,
accepting a match from Weary. "There's a carload of--" He pulled in his
head hurriedly and laid supple fingers on the telegraph key to answer a
call, and the Happy Family moved down to the other end of the platform
where there was more shade.

The agent presently appeared pushing the truck of outgoing express,
a cheap trunk and a basket "telescope" belonging to one of the hotel
girls--who had quit her job and was sitting now inside waiting for
the train and seeing what she could of the Flying U boys through the
window--and the mail sack. He placed the truck where the baggage car
would come to a halt, stood for a minute looking down the track where a
smudge of smoke might at any moment be expected to show itself over the
low ridge of a hill, glanced at the lazy group in the patch of shade and
went back into the office.

"There's her smoke," Cal Emmett announced in the midst of an apathetic
silence.

Weary looked up from whittling a notch in the end of a platform plank
and closed his jack-knife languidly.

Andy pushed his hat backward and then tilted it forward over one eyebrow
and threw away his cigarette.

"Wonder if Florence Grace will be riding point on the bunch?" he
speculated aloud. "If she is, I'm liable to have my hands full. Florence
Grace will sure be sore when she finds out how I got into the game."

"Aw, I betche there ain't no such a person," said Happy Jack, doubter to
the last.

"I wish there wasn't," sighed Andy. "Florence Grace is kinda getting
on my nerves. If I done what I feel like doing, I'd crawl under the
platform and size up the layout through a crack. Honest to gracious,
Boys, I hate to meet that lady."

They grinned at him heartlessly and stared at the black smudge that was
rolling toward them. "She's sure hittin' her up," Pink vouchsafed with a
certain tenseness of tone. That train was not as ordinary trains; dimly
they felt tha