"I'd rather not do that," he decided. "I don't want to be a drain on the brand—but to help build it up. Suppose I just serve as an extra hand and do whatever necessary turns up—in return for your letting me advise with you on a few points that I happen to have worked out while I was prowling through the country."
"Any way you like," she returned. "It's for you to decide. Any money which you fail to draw now will revert to you in the end so it won't matter in the least."
His reply was irrelevant, a deliberate refusal to notice her ungenerous misinterpretation of his offer.
"Do you mind if I gather a few Three Bar colts round here close and break out my own string before they get back?" he asked.
"Anything you like," she repeated. "I'm not going to quarrel. I've made up my mind to that. I'll be gone the rest of the day."
Five minutes later he saw her riding down the lane. She was not seeking companionship but rather solitude and for hours she drifted aimlessly across the range, sometimes dismounting on some point that afforded a good view and reclining in the warm spring sun. Dusk was falling when she rode back to the Three Bar. As she turned her sorrel, Papoose, into the corral she noticed several four-year-old colts in the pasture lot. As she returned to the house Harris appeared in the door.
"Grub-pile," he announced.
They sat down to a meal of broiled steak, mashed potatoes, hot biscuits, coffee and raspberry jam. She had deliberately absented herself through the noon hour and well past the time for evening meal, confidently expecting to find him impatiently waiting for her to return and prepare food for him.
"You make good biscuits—better than those Waddles stirs up," she said. "Though I'd never dare tell him so." It was the first time she had conceded that there might be even a taint of good in him.
"Well, yes—they're some better than those I usually turn out," he confessed. "Having a lady to feed I flaked the lard in cold instead of just melting it and stirring her in like I most generally do. I'm right glad that you consider them a success."
When the meal was finished she rose without a word and went into her own quarters, convinced that this desertion would certainly call forth a protest; but the man calmly went about the business of washing the dishes as if he had expected nothing else, and presently she heard the door close behind him and immediately afterwards a light appeared in the bunk-house window.
The rattle of pots and pans roused her before daylight. Some thirty minutes later he called to her.
"I've finished," he said. "You'd better eat yours before it gets cold," and the closing of the door announced that he had gone without waiting for an answer. She heard again the sound of saw and axe as he worked up the dry logs into stove lengths. At least he was making good his word to the cook. The sounds ceased when the sun was an hour high and when she looked out to determine the reason she saw him working with four colts in one of the smaller corrals.
He had fashioned a hackamore for each and they stood tied to the corral bars. He left them there and repaired to the big gates of the main corral. The two swinging halves sagged until their ends dragged on the ground when opened or closed, necessitating the expenditure of considerable energy in performing either operation. She watched him tear down the old support wires and replace them with new ones, stretching a double strand from the top of the tall pivot posts to the free ends of the gates. Placing a short stick between the two strands of heavy wire he twisted until the shortening process had cleared the gate ends and they swung suspended, moving so freely that a rider could lean from his saddle and throw them open with ease.
This completed to his satisfaction he fashioned heavy slabs of wood to serve as extra brake-blocks for the chuck wagon. Between the performance of each two self-appointed duties he spent some little time with the colts, handling them and teaching them not to fear his approach, cinching his saddle on first one and then the next, talking to them and handling their heads.
For three days there was little communication between the two. It was evident that he had no intention of forcing his society upon her, and her failure to prepare his meals failed to elicit a single sign to show that he had expected otherwise; the contrary was true, in fact, for he invariably prepared enough for two. It was clear that he exercised the same patience toward her that he showed in handling the green four-year-olds; and she was inclined to be a little scornful of his method of gentle-breaking them. She felt her own ability to handle any horse on the range although old Cal Warren had gentled every animal she had wanted for her own and flatly refused to let her mount any others. Waddles was as insistent upon this point as her parent had been, but never had she known a cowhand who took time and pains to gentle his own string.
In the afternoon of the third day she saw him swing to the back of a big bay, easing into the saddle without a jar, and the colt ambled round the corral, rolling his eyes back toward the thing clamped upon him but making no effort to pitch. He dismounted and stripped off the saddle, cinched it on a second horse and let him stand, leading a third out to a snubbing post near the door of the blacksmith shop where he proceeded to put on his first set of shoes.
The girl went out and sat on the sill of the shop door and watched him. The colt pulled back in an effort to release the forefoot that the man held clamped between his leather-clad knees, then changed his tactics and sagged his weight against Harris.
"You Babe!" the man ordered. "Don't you go leaning on me." He pared down the hoof and fitted the shoe but before nailing it on he released the colt's foot and addressed the girl. "If I'd fight him now while he's spooky and half-scared it would spoil him maybe," he explained.
"I gentle-break mine, too," she said, and the man overlooked the inflection which, as plainly as words, was intended to convey the impression that his ways were effeminate. "If every man used up his time gentling his string he'd never have a day off to work at anything else."
"Why, it don't use up much time," he objected. "They halfway break themselves, standing round with a saddle on and having a man handle them a little between spells of regular work—like cutting firewood and such. And it's a saving of time in the end. There's three hundred odd days every year when a man consumes considerable time fighting every horse he steps up on—if they're broke that way to start."
"So your only reason for not riding them out is to save time," she said.
"If you mean that I'm timid," he observed, "why, I don't know as I'd bother to dispute it." He moved over and sat on his heels facing her, twisting the ever handy cigarette. "Listen," he urged. "Let's you and I try to get along. Now if you'll only make up your mind that I'm not out to grab the Three Bar, not even the half of it that's supposed to be mine—unless you get paid for it—why, we're liable to get to liking each other real well in the end. I'll give you a contract to that effect."
"Which you know would be worthless!" she returned. "The will specifically states that any agreements between us prior to the time of division are to be disregarded. A written contract would have no more value than your unsupported promise and in view of what's happened you don't expect me to place a value on that."
He pulled reflectively at his cigarette and she rather expected another of the irrelevant remarks with which he so often replied to her pointed thrusts.
"No," he said at last. "But it's a fact that I don't want the Three Bar—or rather I do if you should ever decide to sell."
"I never will," she stated positively. "It's always been my home. I've been away and had a good time; three winters in school and enjoying every second; but there always comes a time when I'm sick to get back, when I know I can't stay away from the Three Bar, when I want to smell the sage and throw my leg across a horse—and ride!"
"I know, Billie," he said softly. "I was raised here, up until I was eight. My feeling is likely less acute than yours but I've always hankered to get back to where the sage and pine trees run together. I mentioned a while back that I was tied up peculiar and stood to lose considerable if I failed to put in two years out here—which wouldn't have been of any particular consequence only that