For twenty-four hours Ford had been more than usually restless and moody.  Even Buddy had noticed that, and complained that Ford was cross and wouldn’t talk to him; whereupon Mrs. Kate had scolded Josephine and accused her of being responsible for his gloom and silence.  Since Josephine’s conscience sustained the charge, she resented the accusation and proceeded deliberately to add to its justice; which did not make Ford any the happier, you may be sure.  For when a man reaches that mental state which causes him to carry a girl’s ribbon folded carefully into the most secret compartment of his pocketbook, and to avoid the girl herself and yet feel like committing assault and battery with intent to kill, because some other man occasionally rides with her for an hour or two, he is extremely sensitive to averted glances and chilly tones and monosyllabic conversation.

Since the day before, when she had ridden as far as the stage road with Dick, when he went to the line-camp, Ford had been fighting the desire to saddle a horse and ride to town; and the thing that lured him townward confronted him now in that gray stone jug with the brown neck and handle.

He lifted the jug, shook it tentatively, pulled out the cork with a jerk that was savage, and looked around the room for some place where he might empty the contents and have done with temptation; but there was no receptacle but the stove, so he started to the door with it, meaning to pour it on the ground.  Mose just then shambled past the window, and Ford sat down to wait until the cook was safe in the kitchen.  And all the while the cork was out of that jug, so that the fumes of the whisky rose maddeningly to his nostrils, and the little that he had swallowed whipped the thirst-devil to a fury of desire.

In the kitchen, Mose rattled pans and hummed a raucous tune under his breath, and presently he started again for the stable.  Dick, desultorily bracing a leaning post of one of the corrals, saw him coming and grinned.  He glanced toward the bunk-house, where Ford still lingered, and the grin grew broader.  After that he went all around the corral with his hammer and bucket of nails, tightening poles and braces and, incidentally, keeping an eye upon the bunk-house; and while he worked, he whistled and smiled by turns.  Dick was in an unusually cheerful mood that day.

Mose came shuffling up behind him and stood with his stiff leg thrust forward and his hands rolled up in his apron.  Dick could see that he had something clasped tightly under the wrappings.

“Say, that he-hen—­she laid twice in the same place!” Mose announced confidentially.  “Got ’em both—­for m’mince pies!” He waggled his head, winked twice with his left eye, and went back to the bunk-house.

Still Ford did not appear.  Josephine came, however, in riding skirt and gray hat and gauntlets, treading lightly down the path that lay all in a yellow glow which was not so much sunlight as that mellow haze which we call Indian Summer.  She looked in at the stable, and then came straight over to Dick.  There was, when Josephine was her natural self, something very direct and honest about all her movements, as if she disdained all feminine subterfuges and took always the straight, open trail to her object.