“Been looking for some strays down at Three Pines,” he explained.  “Awful glad I met you.”

“Where were you going now?” she asked.

“Home, I reckon; but I’ll ride with you to Seven Mile if you don’t mind.”

She looked at her watch.  “It’s just five-thirty.  We’ll be in time for supper, and you can ride home afterward.”

“I guess you know that will suit me, Phyllis,” he answered, with a meaning look from his dark eyes.

“Supper suits most healthy men so far as I’ve noticed,” she said carelessly, her glance sweeping keenly over him before it passed to the purple shadowings that already edged the mouth of a distant canon.

“I’ll bet it does when they can sit opposite Phyl Sanderson to eat it.”

She frowned a little, the while he took her in out of half-shut, smoldering eyes, as one does a picture in a gallery.  In truth, one might have ridden far to find a living picture more vital and more suggestive of the land that had cradled and reared her.

His gaze annoyed her, without her quite knowing why.  “I wish you wouldn’t look at me all the time,” she told him with the boyish directness that still occasionally lent a tang to her speech.

“And if I can’t help it?” he laughed.

“Fiddlesticks!  You don’t have to say pretty things to me, Brill Healy,” she told him.

“I don’t say them because I have to.”

“Then I wish you wouldn’t say them at all.  There’s no sense in it when you’ve known a girl eighteen years.”

“Known and loved her eighteen years.  It’s a long time, Phyl.”

Her eyes rained light derision on him.  “It would be if it were true.  But then one has to forget truth when one is sentimental, I reckon.”

“I’m not sentimental.  I tell you I’m in love,” he answered.

“Yes, Brill.  With yourself.  I’ve known that a long time, but not quite eighteen years,” she mocked.

“With you,” he made answer, and something of sullenness had by this time crept into his voice.  “I’ve got as much right to love you as any one else, haven’t I?  As much right as that durned waddy, Keller?”

Fire flashed in her eyes.  “If you want to know, I despise you when you talk that way.”

The anger grew in him.  “What way?  When I say anything against the rustler, do you mean?  Think I’m blind?  Think I can’t see how you’re running after him, and making a fool of yourself about him?”

“How dare you talk that way to me?” she flamed, and gave her surprised pony a sharp stroke with the quirt.

Five minutes later the bronchos fell again to a walk, and Healy took up the conversation where it had dropped.

“No use flying out like that, Phyl.  I only say what any one can see.  Take a look at the facts.  You meet up with him making his getaway after he’s all but caught rustling.  Now, what do you do?”

“I don’t believe he was rustling at all.”