“There!” Mason reached out and tapped him impressively on the arm with a match he was about to light.  “Now you’ve got the bull right by the horns!  You ain’t so darned sure of yourself now—­and so I’m dead willing to gamble on you.  I ain’t a bit afraid to go off and let you have full swing.”

“Well, I hope you won’t feel like kicking me all over the ranch when you get back,” Ford said, after a long pause, during which Mason’s whole attention seemed centered upon his cigarette.  “It’s going to be an uphill climb, old-timer—­and a blamed long hill at that.  And it’s going to be pretty darned slippery, in places.”

“I sabe that, all right,” grinned Mason.  “But I sabe you pretty well, too.  You’ll dig in your toes and hang on by your eye-winkers if you have to.  But you’ll get up, all right; I’ll bank on that.

“Speaking of booze-fighters,” he went on, without giving Ford a chance to contradict him, “I wish you’d keep an eye on old Mose.  Now, there’s a man that’ll drink whisky as long as it’s made, if he can get it.  I wouldn’t trust that old devil as far as I can throw him, and that’s a fact.  I have to watch pretty close, to keep it off the ranch, and him on.  It’s the only way to get along with him—­he’s apt to run amuck, if he gets full enough; and good cooks are as scarce as good foremen.”  A heartening smile went with the last sentence.

“If he does make connections with the booze, don’t can him, Ford, if you can help it.  Just shut him up somewhere till he gets over it.  There’s nothing holds good men with an outfit like the right kind of grub—­and Mose sure can cook.  The rest of the men you can handle to suit yourself.  Slim and Johnnie are all right over at Ten Mile—­you made a good stab when you picked them two out—­and you will want a couple of fellows here besides Walt, to feed them calves.  When the cows are throwed back on the range and the fences gone over careful—­I ought to have tended to that before, but I got to putting it off—­you can pay off what men you don’t need or want.”

There was no combating the friendship of a man like that.  Ford mentally squared his shoulders and set his feet upon the uphill trail.

He realized to the full the tribute Mason paid to his innate trustworthiness by leaving him there, master of the ranch and guardian of his household god—­and goddess, to say nothing of Josephine, whom Mason openly admired and looked upon as one of the family.

Of a truth, it would seem that she had really become so.  Ford had gathered, bit by bit, the information that she was quite alone in the world, so far as immediate relatives were concerned, and that she was Kate’s cousin, and that Kate insisted that this was to be her home, from now on.  Josephine’s ankle was well enough now so that she was often to be met in unexpected places about the ranch, he discovered.  And though she was not friendly, she was less openly antagonistic than she had been—­and when all was said and done, eminently able to take care of herself.