“Oh, yes!” she said brightly. “We came home on the same ship. Mr. Green had been wounded, you know, and was under my care. We got to be—great friends.”
Was there a touch of meaning in the last two words? Stratton preferred to lay it to his imagination, and was glad of the diversion caused by the introduction of the young man, who proved to be Miss Manning’s brother. Buck was not at all impressed by the fellow’s handsome face, athletic figure, and immaculate clothes. The clothes especially seemed ridiculously out of place for even a visitor on a ranch, and he had always detested those dinky half-shaved mustaches.
Meanwhile the trunks had been carried in and the team led away, and Pedro was peevishly complaining from the kitchen door that dinner was getting cold. Buck learned that the visitors were from Chicago, where they had been close friends of the Thorne family for years, and then he managed to break away and join the fellows in the kitchen.
During the meal there was a lot of more or less quiet joking on the subject of Stratton’s acquaintance with the lady, which he managed to parry rather cleverly. As a matter of fact the acute horror he felt at the very thought of the truth about himself getting out, quickened his wits and kept him constantly 139 on his guard. He kept his temper and his head, explaining calmly that Miss Manning had been one of the nurses detailed to look after the batch of wounded men of whom he had been one. Naturally he had seen considerable of her during the long and tedious voyage, but there were one or two others he liked equally well.
His careless manner seemed to convince the men that there was no particular amusement to be extracted from the situation, and to Buck’s relief they passed on to a general discussion of strangers on a ranch, the bother they were, and the extra amount of work they made.
“Always wantin’ to ride around with yuh an’ see what’s goin’ on,” declared Butch Siegrist sourly. “If they’re wimmin, yuh can’t even give a cuss without lookin’ first to see if they’re near enough to hear.”
Stratton made a mental resolution that if anything of that sort came up, he would do his best to duck the job of playing cicerone to Miss Stella Manning, attractive as she was. So far his bluff seemed to have worked, but with a mind so entirely blank of the slightest detail of their acquaintance, he knew that at any moment the most casual remark might serve to rouse her suspicion.
Fortunately, his desire to remain in the background was abetted by Tex Lynch. Whether or not the foreman wanted to keep him away from the ranch-owner’s 140 friends as well as from Miss Thorne herself, Buck could not quite determine. But while the fence-repairing progressed, Stratton was never by any chance detailed to other duties which might keep him in the neighborhood of the ranch-house, and on the one occasion when Miss Thorne and her guests rode out to where the men were working, Lynch saw to it that there was no opportunity for anything like private conversation between them and the object of his solicitude.
Buck watched his manœuvering with secret amusement.
“Wouldn’t he be wild if he knew he was playing right into my hands?” he thought.