"Your brekfast is in the oven we wont be back till dark maby. Don't leave the ranch today. Yr loveing father."
Lorraine hugged the cat so violently that she choked off a purr in the middle. "'Don't leave the ranch to-day!' Ket, I believe it's going to be dangerous or something, after all."
She dressed quickly and went outside into the sunlight, the cat at her heels, the thrill of that one command filling the gray monotone of the hills with wonderful possibilities of adventure. Her father had made no objection before when she went for a ride. He had merely instructed her to keep to the trails, and if she didn't know the way home, to let the reins lie loose on Yellowjacket's neck and he would bring her to the gate.
Yellowjacket's instinct for direction had not been working that day, however. Lorraine had no sooner left the ranch out of sight behind her than she pretended that she was lost. Yellowjacket had thereupon walked a few rods farther and stopped, patiently indifferent to the location of his oats box. Lorraine had waited until his head began to droop lower and lower, and his switching at flies had become purely automatic. Yellowjacket was going to sleep without making any effort to find the way home. But since Lorraine had not told her father anything about it, his injunction could not have anything to do with the unreliability of the horse.
"Now," she said to the cat, "if three or four bandits would appear on the ridge, over there, and come tearing down into the immediate foreground, jump the gate and surround the house, I'd know this was the real thing. They'd want to make me tell where dad kept his gold or whatever it was they wanted, and they'd have me tied to a chair—and then, cut to Lone Morgan (that's a perfectly wonderful name for the lead!) hearing shots and coming on a dead run to the rescue." She picked up the cat and walked slowly down the hard-trodden path to the stable. "But there aren't any bandits, and dad hasn't any gold or anything else worth stealing—Ket, if dad isn't a miser, he's poor! And Lone Morgan is merely ashamed of the way I talked to him, and afraid I'll queer myself with the neighbors. No Western lead that I ever saw would act like that. Why, he didn't even want to ride home with me, that day.
"And Bob Warfield and his Ford are incidents of the past, and not one soul at the Sawtooth seems to give a darn whether I'm in the country or out of it. Soon as they found out where I belonged, they brought me over here and dropped me and forgot all about me. And that, I suppose, is what they call in fiction the Western spirit!
"Dad looked exactly as if he'd opened the door to a book agent when I came. He—he tolerates my presence, Ket! And Frank Johnson's pipe smells to high heaven, and I hate him in the house and 'the boys'—hmhm! The boys—Ket, it would be terribly funny, if I didn't have to stay here."
She had reached the corral and stood balancing the cat on a warped top rail, staring disconsolately at Yellowjacket, who stood in a far corner switching at flies and shamelessly displaying all the angularity of his bones under a yellowish hide with roughened hair that was shedding dreadfully, as Lorraine had discovered to her dismay when she removed her green corduroy skirt after riding him. Yellowjacket's lower lip sagged with senility or lack of spirit, Lorraine could not tell which.
"You look like the frontispiece in that horse-doctor book," she remarked, eyeing him with disfavor. "I can't say that comedy hide you've got improves your appearance. You'd be better peeled, I believe."
She heard a chuckle behind her and turned quickly, palm up to shield her eyes from the straight, bright rays of the sun. Now here was a live man, after all, with his hat tilted down over his forehead, a cigarette in one hand and his reins in the other, looking at her and smiling.