“They’re not mine,” she informed him, taking him seriously—­or seeming to do so.  Andy had some trouble deciding just how much of her was sincere.  “They were here when I came, and I can’t take them back with me, so there’s no use in claiming them.  They’d be such a nuisance on the train—­”

“I reckon they would,” Andy agreed, “if yuh had far to go.”

“Well, you can’t call San Jose close,” she observed, meditatively.  “It takes four days to come.”

“You’re a long way from home.  Does it—­are yuh homesick, ever?” Andy was playing for information without asking directly how long she intended to stay—­a question which had suddenly seemed quite important.  Also, why was she stopping here with Take-Notice Johnson, away off from everybody?

“Seeing I’ve only been here four days, the novelty hasn’t worn off yet,” she replied.  “But it does seem more like four weeks; and how I’ll ever stand two months of it, not ever seeing a soul but father—­”

Andy looked reproachful, and also glad.  Didn’t she consider him a soul?  And Take-Notice was her dad!  To be sure, Take-Notice had never mentioned having a daughter, but then, in the range-land, men don’t go around yawping their personal affairs.

Before Take-Notice returned, Andy felt that he had accomplished much.  He had learned that the young woman’s name really was Mary, and that she was a stenographer in a real-estate office in San Jose, where her mother lived; that the confinement of office-work had threatened her with pulmonary tuberculosis (Andy failed, at the moment, to recognize the disease which had once threatened him also, and wondered vaguely) and that the doctor had advised her coming to Montana for a couple of months; that she had written to her father (it seemed queer to have anyone speak of old Take-Notice as “father”) and that he had told her to “come a-running.”

She told Andy that she had not seen her father for five years (Andy knew that Take-Notice had disappeared for a whole winter, about that long ago, and that no one had discovered where he went) because he and her mother were “not congenial.”

He had dismounted, at her invitation, and had gone clanking to the doorstep and sat down—­giving a furtive kick now and then at the black lamb, which developed a fondness for the leathern fringe on his chaps—­and had eaten an orange which she had brought in her trunk all the way from San Jose, and which she had picked from a tree which stood by her mother’s front gate.  He had nibbled a ripe olive—­eating it with what Andy himself would term “long teeth”—­and had tried hard not to show how vile he found it.  He had inspected two star-fishes which she had found last Fourth-of-July at Monterey and had dried; and had crumpled a withered leaf of bay in his hands and had smelled and nearly sneezed his head off; and had cracked and eaten four walnuts—­also gathered from her mother’s yard—­and three almonds from the same source, and had stared admiringly at a note-book filled with funny marks which she called shorthand.