ill-living in town; nor did he flay his soul with doubts lest he should disappoint this man who trusted him so rashly and so implicitly.  Ford was busy at work which appealed to the best of him.  He was thrown into companionship with men who perforce lived cleanly and naturally, and with Ches Mason, who was his friend.  At meals he sometimes gave thought to Mrs. Kate, and frequently to Josephine.  The first he admired impersonally for her housewifely skill, and smiled at secretly for her purely feminine outlook upon life and her positive views upon subjects of which she knew not half the alphabet.  He had discovered that Mason did indeed refrain from smoking in the house because she discountenanced tobacco; and since she had a talent for making a man uncomfortably aware of her disapproval by certain wordless manifestations of scorn for his weaknesses, Ford also took to throwing away his cigarette before he crossed the bridge on his way to her domain.  He did not, however, go so far as Ches, who kept his tobacco, pipe, and cigarette papers in the stable, and was always borrowing “the makings” from his men.

Ford also followed Mason’s example in sterilizing his vocabulary whenever he crossed that boundary between the masculine and feminine element on the ranch, the bridge.  Mrs. Kate did not approve of slang.  Ford found himself carefully eliminating from his speech certain grammatical inaccuracies in her presence, and would not so much as split an infinitive if he remembered in time.  It was trying, to be sure.  Ford thanked God that he still retained a smattering of the rules he had reluctantly memorized in school, and that he was not married (at least, not uncomfortably so), and that he was not compelled to do more than eat his meals in the house.  Mrs. Kate was a nice woman; Ford would tell any man so in perfect sincerity.  He even considered her nice looking, with her smooth, brown hair which was never disordered, her fine, clear skin, her white teeth, her clear blue eyes, and her immaculate shirt-waists.  But she was not a comfortable woman to be with; an ordinary human wearied of adjusting his speech, his manners, and his morals to her standard of propriety.  Ford, quietly studying matrimony from the well-ordered example before him, began to congratulate himself upon not being able to locate his own wife—­since accident had afflicted him with one.  When he stopped, during these first busy days at the Double Cross, to think deeply or seriously upon the mysterious entanglement he had fallen into, he was inclined to the opinion that he had had a narrow escape.  The woman might have remained in Sunset—­and Ford flinched at the thought.