“Huh! I don’t want no ladies in mine if she’s one,” said Mart.
“If I thought you meant that,” said his dad, “there wouldn’t be enough quirts on the rancho to last out what I’d do to you. But seein’ you’re a Canby, I reckon you just slipped a little. Go on now before the both of you get my goat.”
“Not till I’ve kissed you where your mouth ought to be!” cried his daughter, parting his heavy mustache and planting a kiss on his lips.
Then Manzanita and Mart raced from the old one-story adobe to the stables to saddle up. They raced in the saddling, mounted, and raced to the corral gate, and out of the yard to the desert, where they continued to race over the yellow stretches toward the big dirty-white tents that were rising one by one against the background of the calico buttes.
Although nineteen and sixteen respectively, these children of the desert were not so sophisticated as are young persons of the same age born and reared in cities, and they acted like sixteen and thirteen, which they were perhaps in worldly experience. It seemed to their doting, gray-headed father that neither ever would grow up. And he did not know that he wished it to occur too soon, in Mart’s case, anyway. But Manzanita was growing altogether too pretty and susceptible to be allowed to dance with cow-punchers and penniless prospectors much longer, for Squawtooth knew the way of a man and a maid, and the girl showed a marked preference for the chapped and ragged-shirted man of the plains. She was of age and her own mistress—and girls married young in the cattle country.
“I’m going to do it to-day, Martie!” came his sister’s shout on the morning wind. “I’m going to snub Mangan and make friends with the dirtiest flunky in the bunch! You watch, old kid!”
“Mr. Mangan!” shrilly corrected Mart from behind, for his snip-nosed bay was no match for Manzanita’s pinto mare.
CHAPTER V
VISITORS
THE stock of the Mangan-Hatton Company were soft from the trip by train from Utah, and the pull through the desert sand on top of that had worn them out. Therefore Hunter Mangan decided to let them rest out their first day in the new camp, while the men devoted themselves to making their coming sojourn at the foot of the buttes as comforting as possible.
Early they went to work and before the two young Canbys swooped down upon them, the large dining tent and the cook tent were up, together with several bunk tents and the commissary, which last was as big and as round as a good-sized circus tent. Now the men were at work on the stable tent—a mere “top” of huge proportions. At their portable forges the smiths were busy shoeing horses, sharpening drills, and mending broken implements. Freighters and axmen had gone to the distant mountains for piñon pine fir, and mountain mahogany for fuel, as the desert greasewood supply soon would prove insufficient for the big camp’s needs. In the commissary tent the clerks arranged their stock of goods. In the office tent the bookkeeper, his assistant, and the timekeeper fussed with their appliances and books. In the cook tent and dining tent the cooks and flunkies worked, setting up the long oilcloth-covered tables, mending benches broken by travel, building shelves, and sorting out provisions.