“Yuh seem to be some busy over here,” he remarked carelessly, turning his eyes to the new ditch.

“Well, yes.  Brown’s having a ditch put in here.  We only started a few days ago; them da—­them no-account Swedes he got to do the rough work are so slow, we’re liable to be at it all summer.  How’s everybody at the ranch?  How’s your mother, Miss Bridger?  Has she got any mince pies baked?”

“I don’t know—­you might ride over with us and see,” she invited, smiling at him again.  “We were just going to turn back—­weren’t we, Billy Boy?”

“Sure!” he testified, and for the first time found some comfort in being called Billy Boy; because, if looks went for anything, it certainly made the Pilgrim very uncomfortable.  The spirits of Billy rose a little.

“If you’ll wait till I saddle up, I’ll go along.  I guess the Svenskies won’t run off with the camp before I get back,” said the Pilgrim, and so they stayed, and afterward rode back together quite amiably considering certain explosive elements in the party.

Perhaps Billy’s mildness was due in a great measure to his preoccupation, which made him deaf at times to what the others were saying.  He knew that they were quite impersonal in their talk, and so he drifted into certain other channels of thought.

Was Brown going to start another cow-outfit, or was he merely going to try his hand at farming?  Billy knew that—­unless he had sold it—­Brown owned a few hundred acres along the creek there; and as he rode over it now he observed the soil more closely than was his habit, and saw that, from a passing survey, it seemed fertile and free from either adobe or alkali.  It must be that Brown was going to try ranching.  Still, he had held out all his best stock, and Billy had not heard that he had sold it since.  Now that he thought of it, he had not heard much about Brown since Dill bought the Double-Crank.  Brown had been away, and, though he had known in a general way that the Pilgrim was still in his employ, he did not know in what capacity.  In the absorption of his own affairs he had not given the matter any thought, though he had wondered at first what crazy impulse caused Brown to sell the Double-Crank.  Even now he did not know, and when he thought of it the thing irritated him like a puzzle before it is solved.

So greatly did the matter trouble him that immediately upon reaching the ranch he left Flora and the Pilgrim and hunted up Dill.  He found him hunched like a half-open jackknife in a cane rocker, with his legs crossed and one long, lean foot dangling loosely before him; he was reading “The Essays of Elia,” and the melancholy of his face gave Billy the erroneous impression that the book was extremely sad, and caused him to dislike it without ever looking inside the dingy blue covers.

“Say, Dilly, old Brown’s putting in a ditch big enough to carry the whole Missouri River.  Did yuh know it?”

Dill carefully creased down the corner of the page where he was reading, untangled his legs and pulled himself up a bit in the chair.  “Why, no, I don’t think I have heard of it,” he admitted.  “If I have it must have slipped my mind—­which isn’t likely.”  Dill was rather proud of his capacity for keeping a mental grasp on things.