“Do you know where Mr. Campbell is, Dick?” she asked him, and added no explanation of her desire to know.

“I do,” said Dick, with the rising inflection which was his habit, when the words were used for a bait to catch another question.

“Well, where is he, then?”

Dick straightened up and smiled down upon her queerly.  “Count ten before you ask me that again,” he parried, “because maybe you’d rather not know.”

Josephine lifted her chin and gave him that straight, measuring stare which had so annoyed Ford the first time he had seen her.  “I have counted,” she said calmly after a pause.  “Where is Mr. Campbell, please?”—­and the “please” pushed Dick to the very edge of her favor, it was so coldly formal.

“Well, if you’re sure you counted straight, the last time I saw him he was in the bunk-house.”

“Well?” The tone of her demanded more.

“He was in the bunk-house—­sitting close up to a gallon jug of whisky.”  His eyelids flickered.  “He’s there yet—­but I wouldn’t swear to the gallon—­”

“Thank you very much.”  This time her tone pushed him over the edge and into the depths of her disapproval.  “I was sure I could depend upon you—­to tell!”

“What else could I do, when you asked?”

But she had her back to him, and was walking away up the path, and if she heard, she did not trouble to answer.  But in spite of her manner, Dick smiled, and brought the hammer down against a post with such force that he splintered the handle.

“Something’s going to drop on this ranch, pretty quick,” he prophesied, looking down at the useless tool in his hand.  “And if I wanted to name it, I’d call it Ford.”  He glanced up the path to where Josephine was walking straight to the west door of the bunk-house, and laughed sourly.  “Well, she needn’t take my word for it if she don’t want to, I guess,” he muttered.  “Nothing like heading off a critter—­or a woman—­in time!”

Josephine did not hesitate upon the doorstep.  She opened the door and went in, and shut the door behind her before the echo of her step had died.  Ford was lying as he had lain once before, upon a bunk, with his face hidden in his folded arms.  He did not hear her—­at any rate he did not know who it was, for he did not lift his head or stir.

Josephine looked at the jug upon the floor beside him, bent and lifted it very gently from the floor; tilted it to the window so that she could look into it, tilted her nose at the odor, and very, very gently put it back where she had found it.  Then she stood and looked down at Ford with her eyebrows pinched together.

She did not move, after that, and she certainly did not speak, but her presence for all that became manifest to him.  He lifted his head and stared at her over an elbow; and his eyes were heavy with trouble, and his mouth was set in lines of bitterness.

“Did you want me for something?” he asked, when he saw that she was not going to speak first.