“Don’t let it get away with you,” Rock told him. “Keep mum. I’ll be back here again, by and by. If anybody inquires about me, say I quit the Marias because there was too much high life around here to suit me.”
The boy grinned and said no more. In an hour the TL was severally and collectively asleep. It seemed to Rock that he had no more than closed his eyes before they opened again at the first streak of dawn. He had caught up his two horses the night before. Now he went down to the stable to feed them. A lot of miles lay ahead of those ponies. When he came back to the house, smoke streamed from the kitchen chimney, and Nona was making coffee and slicing bacon. The two of them were the only souls astir. It was still an hour and a half before the regular rising time.
“You didn’t have to get up at this unearthly hour,” Rock protested.
“I heard you, and I didn’t want you to go away without your breakfast,” she said.
“For a fellow that has no use for men,” Rock teased, “you are awful darned good to them. You’d make an excellent wife for a ranchman.”
“I am a pretty darned good ranchman myself, without being a wife, thank you, Mister Holloway,” she retorted.
“You won’t escape forever,” he told her. “Some of these days somebody will spread a wide loop and snare you.”
Nona slid three strips of bacon on a hot plate and set it before him, with a toss of her head.
“Men,” she said disdainfully, “seem to think that a woman’s chief business in life is to be captured by some man.”