“I’d as soon ride range here as anywhere,” he said. “It’s immaterial to me who I work for, so long as it’s my kind of work.”
“Are you one of these stock hands that considers it beneath his dignity to work for any outfit with less than ten thousand head of cattle?” she asked, with a comical note of asperity.
“Well, no,” he laughed. “Hardly so finicky as that. If you’ve got a rider’s job for me, consider me on the pay roll. Only, I’d like to know, if I’m going to work for you, whether I’m likely to find myself being buried some morning at sunrise—and why?”
“Wait a minute,” she said. She turned back into the house. In a second she was back with a hat on and two shiny tin pails.
“Come down to the stable with me, and we’ll talk this over while I milk. I was in such a state last night that I forgot the cows. Will you saddle up and bring them in out of the pasture?”
Rock drove two amiable-looking red cows from the far end of a small pasture to the corral. The girl tied both to the fence and sat down beside one on a low stool.
“Can you milk?” she asked, with the faintest shadow of a smile.
“Never did,” he answered truthfully.
“It’s considered woman’s work, I suppose,” she replied. “But even the wild and woolly cowboy, I notice, likes real milk and cream and butter. I don’t want you to milk cows, though. I’m not running a dairy. I have about eight hundred cattle scattered around here.”
“Your ranch outfit looks like about eight thousand,” Rock remarked.