“Now, if you’ll kindly trot ahead,” he announced as he relighted his little briar pipe, “and show me the trail to the ranch of the blighted windmill, I’ll idle along behind you.”
I resented the placidity with which he was accepting a situation that should have called for considerable meekness on his part. And I sat there for a silent moment or two on Paddy, to make that resentment quite obvious to him.
“What’s your name?” I asked, the same as I’d ask the name of any new help that arrived at Alabama Ranch.
“Peter Ketley,” he said, for once both direct and sober-eyed.
“All right, Peter,” I said, as condescendingly as I was able. “Just follow along, and I’ll show you where the bunk-house is.”
It was his grin, I suppose, that irritated me. So I started off on Paddy and went like the wind. I don’t know whether he called it idling or not, but once or twice when I glanced back at him that touring-car was bounding like a reindeer over some of the rougher places in the trail, and I rather fancy it got some of the mud shaken off its running-gear before it pulled up behind the upper stable at Alabama Ranch.
“You ride like a ritt-meister,” he said, with an approvingly good-natured wag of the head, as he came up as close as Paddy would permit.
“Danke-schön!” I rather listlessly retorted, “And if you leave the car here, close beside this hay-stack, it’ll probably not be seen until after dinner. Then some time this afternoon, if the coast is clear, you can get it covered up.”
I was a little sorry, the next moment, that I’d harped still again on an act which must have become painful for him to remember, since I could see his face work and his eye betray a tendency to evade mine. But he thanked me, and explained that he was entirely in my hands.
Such being the case, I was more excited than I’d have been willing to admit when I led him into the shack. Frontier life had long since taught me not to depend too much on appearances, but the right sort of people, the people who out here are called “good leather,” would remain the right sort of people in even the roughest wickiup. We may have been merely ranchers, but I didn’t want Peter, whatever his morals, to think that we ate our food raw off the bone and made fire by rubbing sticks together.