Mrs. Bailey chuckled.  “I’m callin’ ’em ‘heavenly,’ Jim, to kind of even up for what the boys call ’em.  I don’t use that kind of language.”

Pete graduated from peeling potatoes and helping about the house to riding line with young Andy, until the fall round-up called for all hands, the loading of the chuck-wagon and a farewell to the lazy days at the home ranch.  The air was keen with the tang of autumn.  The hillside blue of spruce and pine was splashed here and there with the rich gold of the quaking asp.  Far vistas grew clearer as the haze of summer heat waned and fled before the stealthy harbingers of winter.  In the lower levels of the distant desert, heat waves still pulsed above the grayish brown reaches of sand and brush—­but the desert was fifty, sixty, eighty miles away, spoken of as “down there” by the riders of the high country.  And Young Pete, detailed to help “gather” in some of the most rugged timberland of the Blue, would not have changed places with any man.  He had been allotted a string of ponies, placed under the supervision of an old hand, entered on the pay-roll at the nominal salary of thirty dollars a month, and turned out to do his share in the big round-up, wherein riders from the T-Bar-T, the Blue, the Eight-O-Eight, and the Concho rode with a loose rein and a quick spur, gathering and bunching the large herds over the high country.

There was a fly in Pete’s coffee, however.  Young Andy White had been detailed to ride another section of the country.  Bailey had wisely separated these young hopefuls, fearing that competition—­for they were always striving to outdo each other—­might lead to a hard fall for one or both.  Moreover, they were always up to some mischief or other—­Andy working the schemes that Pete usually invented for the occasion.  Up to the time that he arrived at the Concho ranch, Young Pete had never known the joy of good-natured, rough-and-tumble horseplay, that wholesome diversion that tries a man out, and either rubs off the ragged edges of his temper or marks him as an undesirable and to-be-let-alone.  Pete, while possessing a workable sense of humor, was intense—­somewhat quick on the trigger, so to speak.  The frequent roughings he experienced served to steady him, and also taught him to distinguish the tentative line between good-natured banter and the veiled insult.

Unconsciously he studied his fellows, until he thought he pretty well knew their peculiarities and preferences.  Unrealized by Pete, and by themselves, this set him apart from them.  They never studied him, but took him for just what he seemed—­a bright, quick, and withal industrious youngster, rather quiet at times, but never sullen.  Bailey, whose business it was to know and handle men, confided to his wife that he did not quite understand Pete.  And Mrs. Bailey, who was really fond of Pete, was consistently feminine when she averred that it wasn’t necessary to understand him so long as he attended to his work and behaved himself, which was Mrs. Bailey’s way of dodging the issue.  She did not understand Pete herself.  “He does a heap of thinking—­for a boy,” she told Bailey.  “He’s got something’ besides cattle on his mind,” Bailey asserted.  Mrs. Bailey had closed the question for the time being with the rather vague assertion, “I should hope so.”