MINTIE
Mintie stood upon the porch of the old adobe, shading her brown eyes from the sun, now declining out of stainless skies into the brush- hills to the west of the ranch. The hand shading the eyes trembled; the red lips were pressed together; faint lines upon the brow and about the mouth indicated anxiety, and possibly fear. A trapper would have recognised in the expression of the face a watchful intensity or apprehension common to all animals who have reason to know themselves to be the prey of others.
Suddenly a shot rang out, repeating itself in echoes from the cañon behind the house. Mintie turned pale, and then laughed derisively.
"Gee!" she exclaimed. "How easy scairt I am!"
She sank, gaspingly, upon a chair, and began to fan herself with the skirt of her gown. Then, as if angry on account of a weakness, physical rather than mental, she stood up and smiled defiantly, showing her small white teeth. She was still trembling; and remarking this, she stamped upon the floor of the porch, and became rigid. Her face charmed because of its irregularity. Her skin was a clear brown, matching the eyes and hair. She had the grace and vigour of an unbroken filly at large upon the range. And, indeed, she had been born in the wilderness, and left it but seldom. Her father's ranch lay forty miles from San Lorenzo, high up in the foothills--a sterile tract of scrub--oak and cedar, of manzanita and chaparral, with here and there good grazing ground, and lower down, where the creek ran, a hundred acres of arable land. Behind the house bubbled a big spring which irrigated the orchard and garden.
Teamsters, hauling grain from the Carisa Plains to the San Lorenzo landing, a distance of nearly a hundred miles, would beguile themselves thinking of the apples which old man Ransom would be sure to offer, and the first big drink from the cold spring.
Mintie was about to enter the house, when she saw down the road a tiny reek of white dust. "Gee!" she exclaimed for the second time.
"Who's this?"
Being summer, the hauling had not yet begun. Mintie, who had the vision of a turkey-buzzard, stared at the reek of dust.
"Smoky Jack, I reckon," she said disdainfully. Nevertheless, she went into the house, and when she reappeared a minute later her hair displayed a slightly more ordered disorder, and she had donned a clean apron.