Racey tickled his mount with the rowels of one spur and stirred him into a trot.  Have to be moving along if he wanted to get there some time that day.  He wished he didn’t have to go alone, so he did.  The old lady would surely lay him out, and he wished for company to share his misery.  Why couldn’t Swing Tunstall have stayed reasonably in Farewell instead of traipsing off over the range like a tomfool.  Might not be back for a week, Swing mightn’t.  Idiotic caper (with other adjectives) of Swing’s, anyway.  Why hadn’t he used his head?  Oh, Racey Dawson was an exceedingly irritable young man as he rode out of Farewell.  The aches and pains were still throbbingly alive in his own particular head.  The immediate future was not alluring.  It was a hard world.

When he and his mount were breasting the first slight rise of the northern slope of Indian Ridge—­which ridge marks with its long, broad-backed bulk the southern boundary of the flats south of Farewell and forces the Marysville trail to travel five miles to go two—­a rider emerged from a small boulder-strewn draw wherein tamaracks grew thinly.

Racey stared—­and forgot his irritation and his headache.  The draw was not more than a quarter-mile distant, and he perceived without difficulty that the rider was a woman.  She quirted her mount into a gallop, and then seesawed her right arm vigorously.  Above the pattering drum of her horse’s hoofs a shout came faintly to his ears.  He pulled up and waited.

When the woman was close to him he saw that it was the good-looking, brown-haired Happy Heart lookout, the girl whose dog he had protected.  She dragged her horse to a halt at his side and smiled.  And, oddly enough, it was an amazingly sweet smile.  It had nothing in common with the hard smile of her profession.

“I’m sorry I had to leave without thanking you for what you done for me back there,” said she, with a jerk of her head toward distant Farewell.

“Why, that’s all right,” Racey told her, awkwardly.

“It meant a lot to me,” she went on, her smile fading.  “You wouldn’t let that feller hurt me or my dog, and I think the world of that dog.”

“Yeah.”  Thus Racey, very much embarrassed by her gratitude and quite at a loss as to the proper thing to say.

“Yes, and I’m shore grateful, stranger.  I—­I won’t forget it.  That dog he likes me, he does.  And I’m teaching him tricks.  He’s awful cunnin’.  And company!  Say, when I’m feeling rotten that there dog knows, and he climbs up in my lap and licks my ear and tries his best to be a comfort.  I tell you that dog likes me, and that means a whole lot—­to me.  I—­I ain’t forgetting it.”

Her face was dark red.  She dropped her head and began to fumble with her reins.

“You needn’t ‘a’ come riding alla way out here just for this,” chided Racey, feeling that he must say something to relieve the situation.

“It wasn’t only this,” she denied, tiredly.  “They was something else.  And I couldn’t talk to you in Farewell without him and his friends finding it out.  That’s why I borrowed one of Mike Flynn’s hosses an’ followed you thisaway—­so’s we could be private.  Le’s ride along.  I expect you was going somewhere.”