Bud Shoop waved his hands helplessly.  “I might ‘a’ knowed it!  A lady can always get a man steppin’ on his own foot when he tries to walk around a argument with her.  You done bribed me and corrupted Bondsman.  But I’m stayin’ right by what I said.”

Dorothy jumped up and took Bud’s big hand in her slender ones.  “You’re just lovely to us!” And her brown eyes glowed softly.

Bud coughed.  His shirt-collar seemed tight.  He tugged at it, and coughed again.

“Missy,” he said, leaning forward and patting her hand,—­“missy, I would send Lorry plumb to—­to—­Phoenix and tell the Service to go find him, just to see them brown eyes of yours lookin’ at me like that.  But don’t you say nothin’ about this here committee meetin’ to nobody.  I reckon you played a trick on me for teasin’ you.  So you think Lorry is a right smart hombre, eh?”

“Oh,” indifferently, “he’s rather nice at times.  He’s company for father.”

“Then I reckon you set a whole lot of store by your daddy.  Now, I wonder if I was a young, bow-legged cow-puncher with kind of curly hair and lookin’ fierce and noble, and they was a gal whose daddy was plumb lonesome for company, and I was to get notice from the boss that I was to vamose the diggin’s and go to work,—­now, I wonder who’d ride twenty miles of trail to talk up for me?”

“Why, I would!”

“You got everything off of me but my watch,” laughed Bud.  “I reckon you’ll let me keep that?”

“Is it a good watch?” she asked, and her eyes sparkled with a great idea.

“Tol’able.  Cost a dollar.  I lost my old watch in Criswell.  I reckon the city marshal got it when I wa’n’t lookin’.”

“Well, you may keep it—­for a while yet.  When are you coming up to visit us?”

“Just as soon as I can, missy.  Here’s your daddy.  I want to talk to him a minute.”

Three weeks later, when the wheels of the local stage were beginning to throw a fine dust, instead of mud, as they whirred from St. Johns to Jason, Bud Shoop received a tiny flat package addressed in an unfamiliar hand.  He laid it aside until he had read the mail.  Then he opened it.  In a nest of cotton batting gleamed a plain gold watch.  A thin watch, reflecting something aristocratic in its well-proportioned simplicity.  As he examined it his genial face expressed a sort of childish wonderment.  There was no card to show from where it had come.  He opened the back of the case, and read a brief inscription.

“And the little lady would be sendin’ this to me!  And it’s that slim and smooth; nothin’ fancy, but a reg’lar thoroughbred, just like her.”

He laid the watch carefully on his desk, and sat for a while gazing out of the window.  It was the first time in his life that a woman had made him a present.  Turning to replace the watch in the box, he saw something glitter in the cotton.  He pulled out a layer of batting, and discovered a plain gold chain of strong, serviceable pattern.