"You know as well as I do the cloud of rustling suspicion that hangs over him. This outfit's not inclined to be pulling on silk gloves where he's concerned. Again let me say that I hope there was no rough treatment."
The father smiled tolerantly. "If I'd known you were so deeply interested, girl o' mine, I'd have kept him by hook or crook or invitation to dinner until you loped in. He rode over with a led saddler, and asked us to keep his silver horse while he's away on some particular business the exact nature of which was left to our imagination. Said his one man, an Irishman named Mahaffy, I believe, would have all he could do looking after the stock—his breeding band—and he did not want to risk Silver while he was gone. I could not refuse such a neighborly request, and I didn't ask any questions. There are times when I don't like to answer. You can have the thrill of exercising the beauty beast if you like."
"He's going away—where?" The girl scarcely realized that she had put a question. She flushed with embarrassment when her father laughed at her.
"Seems to me that some one is strangely interested in one rustler suspect," he commented unfeelingly. "What's friend Dick Murdock going to think and say. I can tell you, though, where the attractive neighbor is going—at least where he said he was going. He has some important business to transact down in Montana."
The girl said no more, but busied herself with a bulky catalogue just received from Eaton's, the Winnipeg department store, a volume that has been called "the next-to-Bible of the West Canada housewife." She made out a sizable order, tossed it across the table for her father's approval, and decided she was tired enough to "dint the feathers."
Flame took refuge of her own room, the size of which was such that it served as bedroom, boudoir and shower-bath—this last an unusual ranch luxury, thanks to the immediate presence of the lake and a windmill which, aided by a lofty tank attachment, gave the entire home ranch a considerable and unfailing water pressure. Hers was a dainty room, done in white and hung with blue draperies. At once it was characteristic and yet it wasn't. Had one seen the young mistress only in saddle clothes, which were waist, breeches and boots, with no compromise of skirt, this blue-and-white—almost Dresden—effect must have seemed somewhat incongruous. But the room was sacred to Flame, the only woman on the ranch. None ever entered it except the China-boy who "made it up and down," as he put it. There, in the mirror of her dresser, she scowled at the freckles that persisted to bridge her nose, but as always decided not to amputate them. Had a pimple appeared—— But fair as was Flame's skin there never had been a prairie draft so hot as to burn her.
This night she put on the flimsiest of the things she had learned to wear in her few years at a Montreal convent—the few years of an education cut short by the death of her mother and a feeling that Dad-Sam would "go wild" did she not return and take care of him. Before she tucked herself in under the silken blue spread that concealed a couple of blankets—provincial nights are cold at this early season—she studied herself in the glass and was not ashamed to preen a trifle. What would he think of her could he see her now and in so different a costume than the rough range ones in which she most often had greeted him? What would he think? And why—why was she worried, or even interested, over what he'd think, if, indeed, he'd think at all?
With the windows particularly open to-night, that she might hear and get into the fray should any attack be made upon the silver horse of suspicion, she pulled the brocaded coverlet up to her chin, and repeated words to herself.
"You fool go to sleep!"
That was the order repeated over and over, at first verbally, then in thought. "Go to sleep—you're tired! Go to sleep!" But for once the order was not obeyed.