Jim Bleeker and a fellow they called Spikes moved over to the Bridger place with as many calves as the hay there would feed, and two men were sent down to the line-camp to winter.  Two were kept at the Double-Crank Ranch to feed the calves and make themselves generally useful—­the quietest, best boys of the lot they were, because they must eat in the house and Billy was thoughtful of the women.

So the Double-Crank settled itself for the long winter and what it might bring of good or ill.

Billy was troubled over more things than one.  He could not help seeing that Flora was worrying a great deal over her father, and that the relations between herself and Mama Joy were, to put it mildly and tritely, strained.  With the shadow of what sorrow might be theirs, hidden away from them in the frost-prisoned North, there was no dancing to lighten the weeks as they passed, and the women of the range land are not greatly given to “visiting” in winter.  The miles between ranches are too long and too cold and uncertain, so that nothing less alluring than a dance may draw them from home.  Billy thought it a shame, and that Flora must be terribly lonesome.

It was a long time before he had more than five minutes at a stretch in which to talk privately with her.  Then one morning he came in to breakfast and saw that the chair of Mama Joy was empty; and Flora, when he went into the kitchen afterward, told him with almost a relish in her tone that Mrs. Bridger—­she called her that, also with a relish—­was in bed with toothache.

“Her face is swollen on one side till she couldn’t raise a dimple to save her life,” she announced, glancing to see that the doors were discreetly closed.  “It’s such a relief, when you’ve had to look at them for four years.  If I had dimples,” she added, spitefully rattling a handful of knives and forks into the dishpan, “I’d plug the things with beeswax or dough, or anything that I could get my hands on.  Heavens!  How I hate them!”

“Same here,” said Billy, with guilty fervor.  It was treason to one of his few principles to speak disparagingly of a woman, but it was in this case a great relief.  He had never before seen Flora in just this explosive state, and he had never heard her say “Heavens!” Somehow, it also seemed to him that he had never seen her so wholly lovable.  He went up to her, tilted her head back a little, and put a kiss on the place where dimples were not.  “That’s one uh the reasons why I like yuh so much,” he murmured.  “Yuh haven’t got dimples or yellow hair or blue eyes—­thank the Lord!  Some uh these days, girlie, I’m going t’ pick yuh up and run off with yuh.”

Her eyes, as she looked briefly up at him, were a shade less turbulent.  “You’d better watch out or she will be running off with you!” she said, and drew gently away from him.  “There!  That’s a horrid thing to say, Billy Boy, but it isn’t half as horrid as—­And she watches me and wants to know everything we say to each other, and is—­” She stopped abruptly and turned to get hot water.