Obviously she was puzzled. Who wouldn't have been? The idea of jesting over as deep a disgrace as can come to a man on the range—a living degradation than which many would have preferred a merciful death!
"What's the idea, Jack?" she demanded after a moment. "For a poor branded man you don't seem as concerned as might be, and if I was going to put the horse thief brand on any misguided freebooter, I'd burn deeper than your decorator seems to have done. I don't get this smear any more than I do your attitude toward it. Suppose you come across clean."
"Sorry, Flame, that you don't like my artistry with the brush," he laughed. "I hadn't time to ride over to the Rafter A and show it to our dashing widow friend."
Shy as a beautiful, speckled trout, she refused to take the bait of Ethel Andress' mention; but she was quick to demand further information regarding the brand.
"Your artistry, what do you mean? And what had a brush to do with it?"
"Recall, if you please, that day not so terribly long ago when you arrived in the nick o' time to save a certain roped ranchman from the decorative efforts of Messrs. Rust and Roper, doubtless members of the impressionistic school and deep burners with the running-iron."
The girl nodded actively and the sergeant went on, changing to the personal form.
"Perhaps you don't remember that I said as we were riding to your home ranch something about a valuable idea that had come to me from the frustrated attempt. This masterpiece of forehead decoration is the working out of that idea. I sent to Strathconna for a tube of blister paste and a brush with which to lay it on. I worked hard to paint an artistic horseshoe and if the effect isn't what it should be, blame the zig-zag crack which Paddy Mahaffy put in my only mirror when he dropped it the other day—seven years' bad luck to him! I didn't put any brand within the shoe, as it is not necessary that the folks I'm going to visit should know exactly where I acquired the mark of the thief. It will be enough that they should think me what I am not—a rustler of horses."
"Then you're going down into Montana on a visit?" she asked, more to gain time in which to ponder the madness of a man who, without compulsion of any sort, would so disfigure himself.
There ensued momentary digression, for he asked her to oblige him by replacing the bandage. He wanted the blistered horseshoe to become well set, and he did not care to exhibit it until he reached his destination.