“Anything but that, son.  You don’t want to make any mistake about this thing.  Brad Steelman’s goin’ to fight like a son-of-a-gun.  He’ll strike at our credit and at our market and at our means of transportation.  He’ll fight twenty-four hours of the day, and he’s the slickest, crookedest gray wolf that ever skulked over the range.”

The foreman of the D Bar Lazy R came in after supper for a conference with his boss.  He and Crawford got their heads together in the sitting-room and the young people gravitated out to the porch.  Joyce pressed Dave into service to help her water the roses, and Keith hung around in order to be near Dave.  Occasionally he asked questions irrelevant to the conversation.  These were embarrassing or not as it happened.

Joyce delivered a little lecture on the culture of roses, not because she considered herself an authority, but because her guest’s conversation was mostly of the monosyllabic order.  He was not awkward or self-conscious; rather a man given to silence.

“Say, Mr. Sanders, how does it feel to be wounded?” Keith blurted out.

“You mustn’t ask personal questions, Keith,” his sister told him.

“Oh!  Well, I already ast this one?” the boy suggested ingenuously.

“Don’t know, Keith,” answered the young man.  “I never was really wounded.  If you mean this scratch in the shoulder, I hardly felt it at all till afterward.”

“Golly!  I’ll bet I wouldn’t tackle a feller shootin’ at me the way that Miller was at you,” the youngster commented in naive admiration.

“Bedtime for li’l boys, Keith,” his sister reminded him.

“Oh, lemme stay up a while longer,” he begged.

Joyce was firm.  She had schooled her impulses to resist the little fellow’s blandishments, but Dave noticed that she was affectionate even in her refusal.

“I’ll come up and say good-night after a while, Keithie,” she promised as she kissed him.

To the gaunt-faced man watching them she was the symbol of all most to be desired in woman.  She embodied youth, health, charm.  She was life’s springtime, its promise of fulfillment; yet already an immaculate Madonna in the beauty of her generous soul.  He was young enough in his knowledge of her sex to be unaware that nature often gives soft trout-pool eyes of tenderness to coquettes and wonderful hair with the lights and shadows of an autumn-painted valley to giggling fools.  Joyce was neither coquette nor fool.  She was essential woman in the making, with all the faults and fine brave impulses of her years.  Unconsciously, perhaps, she was showing her best side to her guest, as maidens have done to men since Eve first smiled on Adam.