She parried the indirect question without seeming to notice it. “You proved that yesterday, coming down from High Mesa. I felt sure I would have you pulling leather.”
“Pulling leather?” he asked. “You see, I own to my tenderfootness.”
“Grabbing your saddle to hold yourself on,” she explained. Before he could reply, she rose in her stirrups and pointed ahead with her quirt. “Look, that’s the top of the biggest haystack, up by the feed-sheds. You’ll see the buildings in half a minute.”
Unheeded by Ashton, she had guided him off to the left, away from Dry Fork, across the angle above its junction with Plum Creek. They were now coming up over the divide between the two streams. Ashton failed to locate the haystack until its two mates and the long, half-open shelter-sheds came into view.
A moment later he was looking at the horse corral and the group of log ranch houses. Below and beyond them the scattered groves of Plum Creek stretched away up across the mesa––green bouquets on the slender silver ribbon of the creek’s midsummer rill.
“Well?” she asked. “What do you think of my home?”
“Your summer home,” he suggested.
“No, my real home,” she insisted. “Auntie couldn’t be nicer or fonder than she is; but her house 63 is a residence, not a home, even to her. Anyway, here, where I have Daddy and Kid––I do so hope you and Kid will become friends.”
“Since you wish it, I shall try to do my part. But it is a matter that might take time, and––” he smiled ruefully and concluded with seeming irrelevance––“I have no home.”
She gazed at him with the look of tender motherly sympathy that he had been too distraught to really feel the previous day. “Do not say that, Mr. Ashton! Though a ranch house is hardly the kind of home to which you are accustomed, you will find that we range folks retain the old-fashioned Western ideas of hospitality.”