“Ain’t that queer?”

The Three were in full enjoyment of the noon smoke on the broad plank bench in front of their ’dobe. Though Lee always encouraged them to smoke in the house, they preferred it there—partly through a rooted instinct that, no matter how cleverly she dissemble, woman is the natural enemy of “Lady Nicotine,” regarding her always as a formidable rival; secondly, because, while sitting at ease, the life of the compound passed under their eyes. Just now, when Sliver’s remark broke the hot noon silence, their attention was concentrated upon Gordon, who sat in the doorway of a ’dobe opposite, playing with a chubby girl of three, while its dark mother looked on with a pleased smile.

“Ain’t what queer?” Jake sent a stream of smoke rings writhing through the warm air. “There’s so many queer things down here I’ll have to ask you to come again.”

Sliver nodded at Gordon. “Ain’t it odd how he cottons to them little Mexes? To me they’re no more’ n little brown dogs. Did you know he sat up night afore last with a sick one?”

“No-o-o-o!” Jake’s surprise knew no bounds.

“He did. Kid had a sore throat that looked like diphtheria, an’ he sat there all night a-painting it with kerosene. Brought it ’round, too, he did.”

“Kain’t understan’ it.” Jake shook his head. “For my part, I’d sink the country under water twenty minutes if I could, an’ drown the hull brown b’iling. But let me tell you, Son, them peculiar interests of his’n ain’t going to hurt him none with Missy. If there’s anything a girl likes in a man it’s to see him make over kids. Marks him for a good daddy, I s’pose, an’ without actually reasoning it out that way it’s what they’re all a-wanting.”

“Don’t seem to have feazed her much as yet,” Sliver grumbled. “Look at him. A fine lad, straight an’ strong an’ true, eddicated an’ well raised; now where in hell ked you find a better match for Lady-girl? But though he’s been here two months, there’s nothing doing. Sometimes I ketch myself wishing he’d hand her a crack like he give me. It ’u’d make her sit up an’ take notice!”

Jake approved the diagnosis. “They’re real friendly—friendly as a brace of bugs in a rug. She likes to chin with him. When he’s telling, evenings, about New York, an’ university doings, her eyes shine like clear wax candles, but ’tain’t fer him. She’s jest a-seeing an’ a-doing an’ a-being what he’s telling. Sure she likes him an’ him her, but, as you say—there’s nothing doing.”

Bull ripped out an oath, but his feeling was so sincere, his disappointment so deep, that the profanity was like unto a consecration. “Makes me feel like knocking their damn young heads together.” As, rising, he tapped the ashes out of his pipe on his huge palm, he added: “I’ve gotter ride out to the valley pastures this afternoon, an’ while I’m that far I’ll jest go on an’ have a word with Mrs. Mills. She’s that clever I’ll bet you she’d have ’em hitched be this if she’d been here.”

“Say!” Sliver’s nod followed Bull as he walked away. “Third time this month—once beca’se he’d heard Betty was ailing; again ’cause it was rumored raiders had been seen around her rancho; now beca’se he wants advice. D’y’ know, I believe it’s the widow herself. Whoopee! kin you think of it! Old Bull an’ her an’ domestic bliss an’—”

“D’you reckon it’s anything to josh about?” Jake sternly interrupted. “I uster laugh at the very idee of living straight an’ sorter scorn them as did, but let me tell you, hombre, that after a man touches forty there ain’t a thing in the world left for him but a wife’s smile across the table an’ children’s hands clutching his knee.” His bleak eyes, lean, sarcastic face, had lit as to a vision. Now the illumination died and left it even colder. “After the pleasant time we’ve had here, that old hell an’ ruin life looks like a bad dream. I’ve thought, sometimes, I’d try to quit it. I would with jest half of Bull’s natural goodness. But I’m bad clean through to the bone. Why, I’m fixing even now, while I’m talking, for a bust. My system’s that dry I ked drink up a lake, an’ my fingers is itching to get into a game.”

“Me, too.” Sliver, always reflective, took the color of Jake’s mood. “I’ll soon be due for a night at the fonda.” He added, with comical pathos: “You bet, I’ll go an’ lie down to it again. But I do wish Felicia, out there, would put in a better brand of p’ison. I suffer so when I’m through.”

“Sure.” Jake accepted the inevitable with fatalism that almost amounted to satisfaction. “One of these days I’ll take a tumble an’ go back to the old life till it’s cut off by the sheriff’s rope. But Bull—”

Seven hours of steady riding brought Bull to the rise from which, on his first visit, he had looked back on the widow’s rancho. The low sun filled the pocket in the hills wherein the buildings stood with fluid gold that set the chrome-yellow walls off in a blaze, fired the red masses of the bougainvillea with deeper flame. It also set a glow on Bull’s face, revealing a softness, expectancy that could not be credited altogether to his mission. A few yards to his right stood an old ’dobe wall, relic of some former building, and so absorbed was he in his musing that he never noticed a rifle-barrel projecting through a crack till a voice broke the golden silence.

“It will pay you, seÑor, to watch more carefully. One could shoot the eyes out of you with perfect ease.”

As Bull turned quickly, a dark face rose above the old wall. Oval in outline, the features, nose, brows, mouth, were all straight, emphasizing its naturally cold expression. Strangest of all, investing it with a weird, uncanny look, the eyes were blue. No hint of a smile warmed its ruling bleakness when he answered Bull’s question.

“Si, the seÑora is there. Ride on, seÑor. I shall watch here for a little while.”

Five minutes later, while Betty sat on Bull’s knee, the widow explained the apparition. “That was Terrubio, my Mexican foreman. He’s very faithful. Always he gets up and takes a look around two or three times in the night, and he does as much work as two ordinary Mexicans. He used to be a bandit in the old days; and once, when the rurales were hot on his trail, he hid in an old stable of ours. We found him next morning, almost shot to pieces. After I’d nursed him back to health Mr. Mills got his pardon from Diaz on condition that he’d stay with us and behave. That’s over ten years ago. He’s been with us ever since, and that old bandit reputation of his has been our best protection.”

“That’s fine, ma’am,” Bull made hearty comment. “It takes a bad man to scare a bad man. I’ll feel easier for knowing this.”

The widow had already dismissed Terrubio’s woman, who served as her criada, for the night. Now while she bustled around preparing Bull’s supper he looked on with huge content, his glance, in its respect and constancy, very like that of a mastiff. Several times, in passing, her skirts brushed him, and at each slight contact he blushed and trembled. Perhaps they were not quite accidental. At least she was fully aware of the effect, for each time she turned quickly to hide a smile. When, at last, she sat down with plump white arms folded on the table to watch him eat, the glow on his face was certainly not due to his business, though he introduced it then.

“Two months he’s been here, ma’am,” he concluded his tale of woe, “an’ nary a thing doing.”

“Why, what did you expect?” Her pretty, plump figure shook with laughter and Betty joined her childish merriment. “Did you think it would happen in the first five minutes? Now just consider—what good would she ever have of a man that would fall as easily as that? They talk of love at first sight, but let me tell you that those are the kind that fall out at second. It takes a slow horse for a steady pull and a slow man for a lasting love. It’s good that he isn’t impressionable, for he’ll go down all the harder for it. And you yourself wouldn’t have liked Lee to fall in love with him at once. But she isn’t that easy kind. The man that gets her will have to win her. But tell me the symptoms. How do they act?”

Bull gave the diagnosis—they appeared to like each other! Were very friendly! She liked to hear him talk! He couldn’t think of anything else!

The widow had checked off each count with a little nod. Now she burst out laughing. “Is that all? My goodness! Mr. Perrin, how blind you men are! That isn’t much to go on. Did you ever see him touch her, or she him, accidental, as it were?”

Recalling the effect of her brushing skirts, Bull blushed, and under the stimulus of personal experience he divined the inwardness of the question. “Sure! She was showing him how to hog-tie a steer t’other day. It lashed out an’ upset them an’ for a minute they was that balled up you kedn’t tell t’other from which. Didn’t seem a bit anxious to let go, either.”

“That’s favorable,” the widow nodded thoughtfully. “Looking at it from a distance, I should say what was needed is a little competition. It’s the life of love as well as trade. A man and a girl are like fire and tow. They’ll go along, nice as you please, till a little rivalry blows up like a wind, then—up in a blaze they go. Has Ramon been at Los Arboles since Mr. Nevil came?”

“A couple of times. But Gordon was out with us on the range, an’ Ramon was gone afore we kem in.”

“It’s a pity he hadn’t been there. He’d feel the same about as we do, and he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t try to cut Ramon out. Let me see.” She mused for a while, chin propped in her hands. Then her face lit up. “I know! I’m having a birthday next week. I’ll make a little party and invite Ramon and Lee. You’ll see to it that Gordon brings her here?”

“But then Bull won’t be able to come,” Betty’s small voice piped, indignantly. “And you told me only yesterday that you weren’t going to ask any one but him.”

Now the widow blushed. But she braved it out. “So I did, dear, and I’d rather have him. But when Lee’s happiness is at stake we’ll have to give up our own pleasure. And you mustn’t call him that. ’Tisn’t respectful. Say Mr. Perrin.”

“But Jake and Sliver do it, and he said I could—didn’t you, Bull? There, you see!” Thus triumphantly vindicated, she was proceeding with further revelations. “Mother will be thirty-sev—” when the widow clapped her hand over the small, traitorous mouth.

She broke into a little, conscious laugh. “I know it’s silly. But was there ever a real woman that would own up to her age? I won’t acknowledge to a day over thirty.”

“And you look five years younger than that, ma’am,” Bull gallantly replied.

He was paid, of course, with a brilliant smile, and, the conspiracy thus consummated, they gradually drifted into one of those pleasant talks, warm, intimate, communicative, which have been banished from the hectic, electric cities, but still linger where the habitants of the mountains, forest, desert, range, spend long evenings under the golden lamplight or flickering fire-blaze. From news of their countryside, rumors of raids and revolutions, neighborhood gossip, it passed on to a closer, more personal note, touching their thoughts, hopes, aspirations.

In the course of it Betty exercised her usual privilege and went to sleep in Bull’s arms. But though, when he retired, the warmth of the soft child-body enwrapped, as before, his heart, his thoughts were not of her. Long after the silence of midnight wrapped the dark house he dismissed a waking dream with the brusque comment:

“’Tain’t for you, Bull. You killed all that years ago, with your own hand.”

He repeated it next morning, looking back on the rancho from the last rise. “No, Son, ’tain’t for you.”

At that moment Betty and her mother stood in the doorway watching his distant figure, and had he been close enough to see and hear he might have read denial of his thought in both the child’s words and the widow’s reflective smile. Said reflection was due to a lively memory of his sudden reddening when she had left her hand in his just a shade longer than was necessary. She blushed, now, and cut off Betty’s words with a sudden squeeze.

“Mother, I just know he’s falling in love with you. Wouldn’t it be nice if he asked—”