"Is this Miss Swaim?" he asked, lifting his hat. "I am Joe Thomson. You may remember that we met down in the blowout two weeks ago."
"I could hardly forget meeting you. Will you sit down?" Jerry offered Joe a chair with a courtesy very unlike the blunt manner of her first words to him a fortnight before.
But in the far recesses of her consciousness all the while the haunting, ever-recurring picture of a handsome face and a faultlessly clad form, even the face and form of a Philadelphia bank clerk, né artist, made the reality of Joe Thomson's presence very commonplace and uninteresting at that moment, and her courtesy was of a perfunctory sort.
"I hope I don't intrude. Were you busy?" Joe asked, something of the embarrassment of the first meeting coming back with the question.
"Yes, I was very busy," Jerry replied, with a smile. "Pick-up work, though. I was just thinking. Lost in thought, maybe."
The moonlight can do so much for a pretty woman, but with Jerry Swaim one could not say whether sunlight, moonlight, starlight, or dull gray clouds did the most. For two weeks the memory of her fair face, as he recalled it in the oak shade down beside the blowout, had not been absent from the young ranchman's mind. And to-night this dainty girl out of the East seemed entrancing.
"You were lost in thought when I saw you before. I had an idea that city girls didn't do much thinking. Is it your settled occupation?" Joe inquired, with a smile in his eyes.
"It is my only visible means of support right now; about as profitable, too, as farming a blowout," Jerry returned.
"Which reminds me of my purpose in thrusting this call upon you," Joe declared. "I didn't realize the situation the other day—and—well, to be plain, I came to beg your pardon for my rudeness in what I said about your claim. I had no idea who you were, you know, but that hardly excuses me for what I said."
"It is very rude to speak so slightingly of land that behaves as beautifully as mine does," Jerry said, with a smile that atoned for the trace of sarcasm in her voice.