Starr might have passed her by and gone on to the cabin if he had not, through a pair of powerful binoculars, been observing her when she sent Pat off, and when she got up and went over to the other ledge and sat down.  Through the glasses he had seen her feet crossed, toes up, just past the nose of the rock, and he could see the spread of her skirt.  Luckily, he could not read her mind.  He therefore gave a yank at the lead-rope in his hand and addressed a few biting remarks to a white-lashed, blue-eyed pinto trailing reluctantly behind Rabbit; and rode forward with some eagerness toward the ridge.

“’Sleep?” he greeted cheerfully, when he had forced the two horses to scramble up to the shade of the ledge, and had received no attention whatever from the person just beyond.  The tan boots were still crossed, and not so much as a toe of them moved to show that the owner heard him.  Starr knew that he had made noise enough, so far as that went.

“Why, no, I’m not asleep.  What is it?” came crisply, after a perceptible pause.

“It ain’t anything at all,” Starr retorted, and swung Rabbit into the shade which Helen May had left.  He dismounted, sat himself down with his back against a rock, and proceeded to roll a cigarette.  By no means would he intrude upon the privacy of a lady, though the quiet, crossed feet and the placid folds of the khaki skirt told him that she was sitting there quietly—­pouting about something, most likely, he diagnosed her silence shrewdly.  Well, it was early, and so long as he reached a certain point by full dark, he was not neglecting anything.  As a matter of fact, he told himself philosophically, he really wanted to kill half a day in a perfectly plausible manner.  There was no hurry, no hurry at all.

Pat looked back at him ingratiatingly, and Starr called.  Pat came running in long leaps, nearly wagging himself in two because someone he liked was going to be nice to him.  Starr petted him and talked to him and pulled his ears and slapped him on the ribs, and Pat in his joy persisted in trying to lick Starr’s cheek.

“Quit it!  Lay down and be a doormat, then.  You’ve got welcome wrote all over you.  And much as I like welcome, I hate to be licked.”

Pat lay down, and Starr eyed the tan boot toes.  They moved impatiently, but they did not uncross.  Starr smiled to himself and proceeded to carry on a one-sided conversation with Pat, and to smoke his cigarette.

“Sick, over there?” he inquired casually after perhaps five minutes; either of them would have sworn it ten or fifteen.

“Why, no,” chirped the crisp voice.  “Why?”

“Seemed polite to ask, is all,” Starr confessed.  “I didn’t think you was.”  He finished his smoke in the silence that followed.  Then, because he himself owned a perverse streak, he took his binoculars from their case and began to study the low-lying ridge in the distance, in a pocket of which nestled the Medina ranch buildings.  He was glad this ridge commanded all but the “draws” and hollows lying transversely between here and Medina’s place.  It was Medina whom he had been advised by his chief to watch particularly, when Starr had found a means of laying his clues before that astute gentleman.  If he could sit within ten feet of Helen May while he kept an eye on that country over there, all the better.