e over here in the shade, and let's have it out
once for all. I know you aren't stuck up over being majordomo, but all
the same you're not the old Dade, whether you know it or not. You go
around as if--well--you know how you've been. What I wanted to say is,
what's the matter? Is it anything I've said or done?"

He sat down on the stone steps of a hut used for a storehouse and
reached moodily for his smoking material. "I know I didn't say anything
about running up against Jose--but it wasn't anything beyond a few
words; and, Dade, you've been almighty hard to talk to lately. If you've
got anything against me--"

"Oh, quit it!" Dade's face glowed darkly with the blood which shame
brought there. He opened his lips to say more, took a long breath
instead, closed them, and looked at Jack queerly. For one reckless
moment he meditated a plunge into that perfect candor which may be
either the wisest or the most foolish thing a man may do in all his
life.

"I didn't think you noticed it," he said, his voice lowered
instinctively because of the temptation to tell the truth, and his
glance wandering absently over to the corral opposite, where Surry stood
waiting placidly until his master should have need of him. "There has
been a regular brick wall between us lately. I felt it myself and I
blamed you for it. I--"

"It wasn't my building," Jack cut in eagerly. "It's you, you old pirate.
Why, you'd hardly talk when we happened to be alone, and when I tried to
act as if nothing was wrong, you'd look so darned sour I just had to
close my sweet lips like the petals of a--"

"Cabbage," supplied Dade dryly, and placed his cigarette between lips
that twitched.

Former relations having thus been established after their own fashion,
Dade began to wonder how he had ever been fool enough to think of
confessing his hurt. It would have built that wall higher and thicker;
he saw it now, and with the lighting of his cigarette he swung back to a
more normal state of mind than he had been in for a month.

"I'm going up toward Manuel's camp, pretty soon," he observed lazily,
eying Jack meditatively through a thin haze of smoke. "Want to take a
ride up that way and let the sun shine on your nice new saddle?" Though
he called it Manuel's camp from force of habit, that hot-blooded
gentleman had not set foot over its unhewn doorsill for three weeks and
more.

Jack hesitated, having in mind the possibility of persuading Teresita
that she ough