“Stella and me raised Phil—­we don’t know any difference between him and one of our own boys.  The old homestead is his, of course, but Jim Reid’s stock runs on the old range.  Phil’s got a few head that he works with mine—­a pretty good bunch by now—­for he’s kept addin’ to what his father left, an’ I’ve paid him wages ever since he was big enough.  Phil don’t say much, even to Stella an’ me, but I know he’s figurin’ on fixin’ up the old home place some day.”

After a long silence the Dean said again, as if voicing some conclusion of his unspoken thoughts:  “Jim Reid is pretty well fixed, you see, an’ Kitty bein’ the only girl, it’s natural, I reckon, that they should have ideas about her future, an’ all that.  I reckon it’s natural, too, that the girl should find ranch life away out here so far from anywhere, a little slow after her three years at school in the East.  She never says it, but somehow you can most always tell what Kitty’s thinkin’ without her speakin’ a word.”

“I have known people like that,” said Patches, probably because there was so little that he could say.

“Yes, an’ when you know Kitty, you’ll say, like I always have, that if there’s a man in Yavapai County that wouldn’t ride the hoofs off the best horse in his outfit, night or day, to win a smile from her, he ought to be lynched.”

That afternoon in Prescott they purchased an outfit for Patches, and the following day set out for the long return drive to the ranch.

They had reached the top of the hill at the western end of the meadow lane, when they saw a young woman, on a black horse, riding away from the gate that opens from the lane into the Pot-Hook-S meadow pasture, toward the ranch buildings on the farther side of the field.

As they drove into the yard at home, it was nearly supper time, and the men were coming from the corrals.

“Kitty’s been over all the afternoon,” Little Billy informed them promptly.  “I told her all about you, Patches.  She says she’s just dyin’ to see you.”

Phil joined in the laugh, but Patches fancied that there was a shadow in the cowboy’s usually sunny eyes as the young man looked at him to say, “That big horse of yours sure made me ride some to-day.”

CHAPTER VI.

The drift fence.

The education of Honorable Patches was begun without further delay.  Because Phil’s time was so fully occupied with his four-footed pupils, the Dean himself became the stranger’s teacher, and all sorts of odd jobs about the ranch, from cleaning the pig pen to weeding the garden, were the text books.  The man balked at nothing.  Indeed, he seemed to find a curious, grim satisfaction in accomplishing the most menial and disagreeable tasks; and when he made mistakes, as he often did, he laughed at himself with such bitter, mocking humor that the Dean wondered.

“He’s got me beat,” the Dean confided to Stella.  “There ain’t nothin’ that he won’t tackle, an’ I’m satisfied that the man never did a stroke of work before in his life.  But he seems to be always tryin’ experiments with himself, like he expected himself to play the fool one way or another, an’ wanted to see if he would, an’ then when he don’t he’s as surprised and tickled as a kid.”