d and went up to the small adobe house where he had lived in
solitary contentment with his cat Compadre until Luck Lindsay, seeking a
cheap headquarters for his free-lance company while he produced the big
Western picture which filled all his mind, had taken calm and unheralded
possession of the ranch. Applehead did not resent the invasion; on
the contrary, he welcomed it as a pleasant change in his monotonous
existence. What he did resent was the coming, first, of the little black
dog that was no more than a tramp and had no right on the ranch, and
that broke all the laws of decency and gratitude by making the life of
the big blue cat miserable. Also he resented the uninvited arrival of
Annie-Many-Ponies from the Sioux reservation in North Dakota.

Annie-Many-Ponies had not only come uninvited--she had remained in
defiance of Luck's perturbed insistence that she should go back home.
The Flying U boys might overlook that fact because of her beauty, but
Applehead was not so easily beguiled--especially when she proceeded
to form a violent attachment to the little black dog, which she called
Shunka Chistala in what Applehead considered a brazen flaunting of her
Indian blood and language, Between the mistress of Shunka Chistala and
the master of the cat there could never be anything more cordial than
an armed truce. She had championed that ornery cur in a way to make
Applehead's blood boil. She had kept the dog in the house at night,
which forced the cat to seek cold comfort elsewhere. She had pilfered
the choicest table scraps for the dog--and Compadre was a cat of
fastidious palate and grew thin on what coarse bits were condescendingly
left for him.

Applehead had not approved of Luck's final consent that
Annie-Many-Ponies should stay and play the Indian girl in his big
picture. In the mind of Applehead there lurked a grudge that found all
the more room to grow because of the natural bigness and generosity of
his nature. It irked him to see her going her calm way with that proud
uptilt to her shapely head and that little, inscrutable smile when she
caught the meaning of his grumbling hints.

Applehead was easy-going to a fault in most things, but his dislike
had grown in Luck's absence to the point where he considered himself
aggrieved whenever Annie-Many-Ponies saddled the horse which had been
tacitly set aside for her use, and rode off into the mesa without a word
of explanation or excuse. Applehead reminded the boys