"Don't perjure yourself," dryly. "Much as I think of Carl I'm not blind to his ways with women. He couldn't have been unbearably raw or you wouldn't have shaken hands with him, would you? I—didn't like his eyes when he said he had work on the railroad."
"Steve, you are developing nerves; your imagination is running wild. One would think that we were back in the days of armed bandits, when masked men held up trains at the point of a gun. That isn't done now, you know," with gay patronage.
"Perhaps—look up on the hill! The boys are bringing down the horses."
The girl's eyes followed his pointing finger. Nose to tail, close herded by riders, the animals trailed toward the corral after their night of feeding in the hillside pastures. They tossed their manes, they made sportive attempts to escape their keepers.
"How well our boys ride." Steve's pulses responded to that possessive "our."
"They ought to. They are as near old-timers as can be found now. The Double O was Uncle Nick's master-passion. He took up the land when it was the ranchman's paradise, in the years before fence-posts and barbed wire, when cowboys packed guns and drank and gambled away their pay. He adapted himself with amazing success to changing conditions though, and hung on to all the real boys whom he could tempt with pay and the pride of raising thoroughbreds."
As Courtlandt stopped the car in front of the ranch-house, the door was flung open and a girl ran down the steps. Jerry stared incredulously. "Peggy! Peggy!" she was out of the car in a flash and had her sister in her arms. Steve heard one more muffled "Peggy!" before the two entered the house. The surprise following so close upon her night's vigil might be too much for Jerry, he feared. When Peg had written him and begged him to keep her coming a surprise he had weakly consented. He had intended to meet her train but had had to delegate Tommy to take his place.
Jerry had quite recovered her poise when she appeared for breakfast in the court. If there was a trace of vibrato in her voice only Courtlandt noticed it. She and Peg had stopped talking long enough to get two hours' sleep. Overhead the sky spread like a Della Robbia glaze, the atmosphere was so clear that the snow-tipped mountains seemed reachable. A tractor in a distant field sounded but a few feet away. The air was sweet with the fragrance of roses, the fountain tinkled musically. Benito, yellow eyes blinking, his gay plumage ruffled till he looked like an animated feather-duster, sidled round and round the rim of the basin.
Peggy regarded her sister with elfish, hazel eyes as she took her seat at the table.
"Ye gods, Jerry, but I'm glad to see you clothed and in your right mind. That green skirt and sweater is a little bit of all right and I'm crazy about your frills; they make me think of the soap-suds you see in the demonstration electric washers, they're so—so fleecy. When you drove up in that vampish gold gown this morning I thought it must be the custom of the country to breakfast in evening clothes and I could have wept. I'd been disillusioned enough. I thought that every honest-to-goodness he-man on a ranch wore chaps and tore about with his six-shooter 'spittin' death and damnation,' but the man who brought out my trunks evidently has a passion for overalls, and Mr. Benson met me at the train looking like a model of the Well-Dressed Man."