"Her COYOTE?"

"HER coyote?"

"What the devil was she doing with a COYOTE?"

The Happy Family stood transfixed, and Chip's eyes were seen to laugh.

"HER COYOTE. Did any of you fellows happen to see a dead coyote up on the grade? Because if you did, it's the doctor's."

Weary Willie walked deliberately over and seized Chip by the shoulders, bringing him to his feet with one powerful yank.

"Don't you try throwing any loads into THIS crowd, young man. Answer me truly-s'help yuh. How did that old maid come by a coyote--a dead one?"

Chip squirmed loose and reached for his cigarette book. "She shot it,"

he said, calmly, but with twitching lips.

"Shot it!" Five voices made up the incredulous echo.

"What with?" demanded Weary when he got his breath.

"With my rifle. I brought it out from town today. Bert Rogers had left it at the barber shop for me."

"Gee whiz! And them creams hating a gun like poison! She didn't shoot from the rig, did she?"

"Yes," said Chip, "she did. The first time she didn't know any better--and the second time she was hot at me for hinting she was scared. She's a s.p.u.n.ky little devil, all right. She's busy hating me right now for running the grade--thinks I did it to scare her, I guess.

That's all some fool women know."

"She's a howling sport, then!" groaned Cal, who much preferred the Sweet Young Things.

"No--I sized her up as a maverick."

"What does she look like?"

"How old is she?"

"I never asked her age," replied Chip, his face lighting briefly in a smile. "As to her looks, she isn't cross-eyed, and she isn't four-eyed.

That's as much as I noticed." After this bald lie he became busy with his cigarette. "Give me that magazine, Cal. I didn't finish cutting the leaves."

CHAPTER III. -- Silver.

Miss Della Whitmore gazed meditatively down the hill at the bunk house.

The boys were all at work, she knew. She had heard J. G. tell two of them to "ride the sheep coulee fence," and had been consumed with amazed curiosity at the order. Wherefore should two st.u.r.dy young men be commanded to ride a fence, when there were horses that a.s.suredly needed exercise--judging by their antics--and needed it badly? She resolved to ask J. G. at the first opportunity.

The others were down at the corrals, branding a few calves which belonged on the home ranch. She had announced her intention of going to look on, and her brother, knowing how the boys would regard her presence, had told her plainly that they did not want her. He said it was no place for girls, anyway. Then he had put on a very dirty pair of overalls and hurried down to help for he was not above lending a hand when there was extra work to be done.

Miss Della Whitmore tidied the kitchen and dusted the sitting room, and then, having a pair of mischievously idle hands and a very feminine curiosity, conceived an irrepressible desire to inspect the bunk house.

J. G. would tell her that, also, was no place for girls, she supposed, but J. G. was not present, so his opinion did not concern her. She had been at the Flying U ranch a whole week, and was beginning to feel that its resources for entertainment--aside from the masculine contingent, which held some promising material--were about exhausted. She had climbed the bluffs which hemmed the coulee on either side, had selected her own private saddle horse, a little sorrel named Concho, and had made friends with Patsy, the cook. She had dazzled Cal Emmett with her wiles and had found occasion to show Chip how little she thought of him; a highly unsatisfactory achievement, since Chip calmly over-looked her whenever common politeness permitted him.

There yet remained the unexplored mystery of that little cabin down the slope, from which sounded so much boylike laughter of an evening. She watched and waited till she was positive the coast was clear, then clapped an old hat of J. G.'s upon her head and ran lightly down the hill.

With her hand upon the k.n.o.b, she ran her eye critically along the outer wall and decided that it had, at some remote date, been treated to a coat of whitewash; gave the k.n.o.b a sudden twist, with a backward glance like a child stealing cookies, stepped in and came near falling headlong. She had not expected that remoteness of floor common to cabins built on a side hill.

"Well!" She pulled herself together and looked curiously about her. What struck her at first was the total absence of bunks. There were a couple of plain, iron bedsteads and two wooden ones made of rough planks. There was a funny-looking table made of an inverted coffee box with legs of two-by-four, and littered with a characteristic collection of bachelor trinkets. There was a gla.s.s lamp with a badly smoked chimney, a pack of cards, a sack of smoking tobacco and a box of matches. There was a tin box with spools of very coa.r.s.e thread, some equally coa.r.s.e needles and a pair of scissors. There was also--and Miss Whitmore gasped when she saw it--a pile of much-read magazines with the latest number of her favorite upon the top. She went closer and examined them, and glanced around the room with doubting eyes. There were spurs, quirts, chaps and queer-looking bits upon the walls; there were cigarette stubs and burned matches innumerable upon the rough, board floor, and here in her hand--she turned the pages of her favorite abstractedly and a paper fluttered out and fell, face upward, on the floor. She stooped and recovered it, glanced and gasped.

"Well!"

It was only a pencil sketch done on cheap, unruled tablet paper, but her mind dissolved into a chaos of interrogation marks and exclamation points--with the latter predominating more and more the longer she looked.

It showed blunt-topped hills and a shallow coulee which she remembered perfectly. In the foreground a young woman in a smart tailored costume, the accuracy of which was something amazing, stood proudly surveying a dead coyote at her feet. In a corner of the picture stood a weather-beaten stump with a long, thin splinter beside it on the ground.

Underneath was written in characters beautifully symmetrical: "The old maid's credential card."

There was no gainsaying the likeness; even the rakish tilt of the jaunty felt hat, caused by the wind and that wild dash across country, was painstakingly reproduced. And the fanciful tucks on the sleeve of the gown--"and I didn't suppose he had deigned so much as a glance!" was her first coherent thought.

Miss Whitmore's soul burned with resentment. No woman, even at twenty-three, loves to be called "the old maid"--especially by a keen-witted young man with square chin and lips with a p.r.o.nounced curve to them. And whoever supposed the fellow could draw like that--and notice every tiny little detail without really looking once? Of course, she knew her hat was crooked, with the wind blowing one's head off, almost, but he had no business: "The old maid's credential card!"--"Old maid," indeed!

"The audacity of him!"

"Beg pardon?"

Miss Whitmore wheeled quickly, her heart in the upper part of her throat, judging by the feel of it. Chip himself stood just inside the door, eying her coldly.

"I was not speaking," said Miss Whitmore, haughtily, in futile denial.

To this surprising statement Chip had nothing to say. He went to one of the iron beds, stooped and drew out a bundle which, had Miss Whitmore asked him what it was, he would probably have called his "war sack." She did not ask; she stood and watched him, though her conscience a.s.sured her it was a dreadfully rude thing to do, and that her place was up at the house. Miss Whitmore was frequently at odds with her conscience; at this time she stood her ground, backed by her pride, which was her chiefest ally in such emergencies.

When he drew a huge, murderous-looking revolver from its scabbard and proceeded calmly to insert cartridge after cartridge, Miss Whitmore was constrained to speech.

"Are you--going to--SHOOT something?"

The question struck them both as particularly inane, in view of his actions.

"I am," replied he, without looking up. He whirled the cylinder into place, pushed the bundle back under the bed and rose, polishing the barrel of the gun with a silk handkerchief.

Miss Whitmore hoped he wasn't going to murder anyone; he looked keyed up to almost any desperate deed.

"Who--what are you going to shoot?" Really, the question asked itself.

Chip raised his eyes for a fleeting glance which took in the pencil sketch in her hand. Miss Whitmore observed that his eyes were much darker than hazel; they were almost black. And there was, strangely enough, not a particle of curve to his lips; they were thin, and straight, and stern.

"Silver. He broke his leg."