"Not a thing. I have had no time for them."
"And no use for them!"
"I did not say that."
"But you looked it, Angus. I'll never forget the look of relief on your face years ago when we appeared to take poor, little lost Faith Winton off your hands—and off your pony. And yet she liked you. She speaks still of how good and kind you were to her, though you frightened her at first."
"She must be thinking of Jean's doughnuts," Angus grinned. "I had forgotten all about it. Where is she now?"
"I don't know. She and her father were in Italy when I heard from her last."
"She would be grown up," Angus deduced. "I wonder if I would know her?"
But the French ranch hove in sight, its big two-story house and maze of stables in a setting of uncared-for fields, which Angus never saw without something akin to pain. A chorus of dogs greeted the sound of wheels, and half a dozen of them shot around the corner of the house.
Angus liked dogs, but not when he was driving colts. But just as they began to dance and the nigh bay had lashed out with a vicious hoof, Gavin French came around the corner, and at his command the dogs shrank as if he had laid a whip across them. Just then Gavin was wearing riding breeches, moccasins, and a flannel shirt wide open at the throat and stagged off at the sleeves, so that the bronzed column of his neck and the full sweep of his long, splendidly muscled arms were revealed. He strode softly, cat-footed, gripping with his toes, and the smoke of the short pipe which was his inseparable companion, drifted behind him.
"Hello, Kit!" he said, and nodded to Angus. "Where is Blake? He went for you."