“Oh, dry up!” Irish commanded impatiently.  “Nobody’s thinking uh riding over there, yuh chump.  What kind of easy marks do yuh think we are?”

Andy laughed audibly in his corner next the window.  “Say, you fellows do amuse me a lot.  By gracious, I’ll bet five dollars some of yuh take the trail over there, soon or late.  I—­I’ll bet five dollars to one that yuh do!  The bet to hold good for—­well, say six weeks.  But yuh better not take me up, boys—­especially Irish, that ain’t got a girl at present.  Yes, or any of yuh, by gracious!  It’ll be a case for breach-uh-promise for any one uh yuh.  Say, she’s a bird!  Got goldy hair, and a dimple in her chin and eyes that’d make a man—­”

With much reviling they accepted the wager, and after that Andy went peacefully to sleep, quite satisfied for the time with the effect produced by his absolute truthfulness; it did not matter much, he told himself complacently, what a man’s reputation might be, so long as he recognized its possibilities and shaped his actions properly.

It is true that when he returned from Dry Lake, not many days after, with a package containing four new ties and a large, lustrous silk handkerchief of the proper, creamy tint, the Happy Family seemed to waver a bit.  When he took to shaving every other day, and became extremely fastidious about his finger-nails and his boots and the knot in his tie, and when he polished the rowels of his spurs with Patsy’s scouring brick (which Patsy never used) and was careful to dent his hat-crown into four mathematically correct dimples before ever he would ride away from the ranch, the Happy Family looked thoughtful and discussed him privately in low tones.

But when Andy smilingly assured them that he was going over to call on Take-Notice’s girl, and asked them if they wouldn’t like to come along and be introduced, and taste a ripe olive, and look at the star-fishes, and smell a crumpled leaf of bay, they backed figuratively from the wiles of him and asserted more or less emphatically he couldn’t work them.  Then Andy would grin and ride gaily away, and Flying U Coulee would see him no more for several hours.  It was mere good fortune—­from Andy’s viewpoint—­that duty did not immediately call the Happy Family, singly or as a whole, to ride across the hills toward the cabin of Take-Notice Johnson.  Without a legitimate excuse, he felt sure of their absence from the place, and he also counted optimistically upon their refusing to ask any one whom they might meet, if Take-Notice Johnson had a daughter visiting him.

Four weeks do not take much space in a calendar, nor much time to live; yet in the four that came just after Andy’s discovery, he accomplished much, even in his own modest reckoning.  He had taught the girl to watch for his coming and to stand pensively in the door with many good-bye messages when he said he must hit the trail.  He had formed definite plans for the future and had promised her quite seriously