“Yuh wait, Dilly, till we get things running the way I want ’em,” he encouraged on one of his brief calls at the ranch.  “I was kinda surprised to find things wasn’t going as smooth as I used to think; when yuh haven’t got the whole responsibility on your own shoulders, yuh don’t realize what a lot of things need to be done.  There’s them corrals, for instance:  I helped mend and fix and toggle ’em, but it never struck me how rotten they are till I looked ’em over this spring.  There’s about a million things to do before snow flies, or we won’t be able to start out fresh in the spring with everything running smooth.  And if I was you, Dilly, I’d go on a still hunt for another cook here at the ranch.  This coffee’s something fierce.  I had my doubts about Sandy when we hired him.  He always did look to me like he was built for herding sheep more than he was for cooking.”  This was in August.

“I have been thinking seriously of getting some one else in his place,” Dill answered, in his quiet way.  “There isn’t very much to do here; if some one came who would take an interest and cook just what we wanted—­I will own I have no taste for that peculiar mixture which Sandy calls ‘Mulligan,’ and I have frequently told him so.  Yet he insists upon serving it twice a day.  He says it uses up the scraps; but since it is never eaten, I cannot see wherein lies the economy.”

“Well, I’d can him and hunt up a fresh one,” Billy repeated emphatically, looking with disapproval into his cup.

“I will say that I have already taken steps toward getting one on whom I believe I can depend,” said Dill, and turned the subject.

That was the only warning Billy had of what was to come.  Indeed, there was nothing in the conversation to prepare him even in the slightest degree for what happened when he galloped up to the corral late one afternoon in October.  It was the season of frosty mornings and of languorous, smoke-veiled afternoons, when summer has grown weary of resistance and winter is growing bolder in his advances, and the two have met in a passion-warmed embrace.  Billy had ridden far with his riders and the trailing wagons, in the zest of his young responsibility sweeping the range to its farthest boundary of river or mountain.  They were not through yet, but they had swung back within riding distance of the home ranch and Billy had come in for nearly a month’s accumulation of mail and to see how Dill was getting on.

He was tired and dusty and hungry enough to eat the fringes off his chaps.  He came to the ground without any spring to his muscles and walked stiffly to the stable door, leading his horse by the bridle reins.  He meant to turn him loose in the stable, which was likely to be empty, and shut the door upon him until he himself had eaten something.  The door was open and he went in unthinkingly, seeing nothing in the gloom.  It was his horse which snorted and settled back on the reins and otherwise professed his reluctance to enter the place.