“Oh, quit it!” Dade’s face glowed darkly with the blood which shame brought there.  He opened his lips to say more, took a long breath instead, closed them, and looked at Jack queerly.  For one reckless moment he meditated a plunge into that perfect candor which may be either the wisest or the most foolish thing a man may do in all his life.

“I didn’t think you noticed it,” he said, his voice lowered instinctively because of the temptation to tell the truth, and his glance wandering absently over to the corral opposite, where Surry stood waiting placidly until his master should have need of him.  “There has been a regular brick wall between us lately.  I felt it myself and I blamed you for it.  I—­”

“It wasn’t my building,” Jack cut in eagerly.  “It’s you, you old pirate.  Why, you’d hardly talk when we happened to be alone, and when I tried to act as if nothing was wrong, you’d look so darned sour I just had to close my sweet lips like the petals of a—­”

“Cabbage,” supplied Dade dryly, and placed his cigarette between lips that twitched.

Former relations having thus been established after their own fashion, Dade began to wonder how he had ever been fool enough to think of confessing his hurt.  It would have built that wall higher and thicker; he saw it now, and with the lighting of his cigarette he swung back to a more normal state of mind than he had been in for a month.

“I’m going up toward Manuel’s camp, pretty soon,” he observed lazily, eying Jack meditatively through a thin haze of smoke.  “Want to take a ride up that way and let the sun shine on your nice new saddle?” Though he called it Manuel’s camp from force of habit, that hot-blooded gentleman had not set foot over its unhewn doorsill for three weeks and more.

Jack hesitated, having in mind the possibility of persuading Teresita that she ought to pay a visit to the Simpson cabin that day to display her latest accomplishment by asking in real, understandable English, how the pup was getting along; and to show the pretty senora the proper way to pat tortillas out thin and smooth, as Margarita had been bribed to teach Teresita herself to do.

“Sure, I’ll go,” he responded, before the hesitation had become pronounced, and managed to inject a good deal of his old heartiness into the words.

“I’m going to have the cattle pushed down this way,” Dade explained, “so you can keep an eye on them from here and we won’t have to keep up that camp.  Since they made Bill Wilson captain of the Vigilantes, there isn’t quite so much wholesale stealing as there was, anyway, and enough vaqueros went with Manuel so I’ll need every one that’s left.  I’ll leave you Pedro, because he can’t do any hard riding, after that fall he got the other day.  The two of you can keep the cattle pretty well down this way.”

“All right.  Say, what was it made you act so glum since we came down here?” Jack, as occasionally happens with a friend, was not content to forget a grievance while the cause of it remained clouded with mystery.