“You outrageous Celt!”

He chuckled.  “A Spaniard takes his love very seriously.  He’s got to be sad and despairing about it, even when he knows very well the girl is saying to herself:  ’For heaven’s sake, when will this windy bird get down to brass tacks and pop the question?’ He droops like a stale eschscholtzia, only, unlike that flower he hasn’t sense enough to shut up for the night!”

Her beaming face turned toward him was ample reward for his casual display of Celtic wit, his knowledge of botany.  And suddenly she saw his first real smile—­a flash of beautiful white teeth and a wrinkling of the skin around the merry eyes.  It came and went like a flicker of lightning; the somber man was an insouciant lad again.

A quarter of a mile across the valley they found the torn and mutilated carcass of a heifer, with a day-old calf grieving beside her.

“This is the work of our defunct friend, the panther,” Farrel explained.  “He had made his kill on this little heifer and eaten heartily.  It occurred to me while we were chasing him that he was logey.  Well—­when Mike’s away the cats will play.”

He reached down, grasped the calf by the forelegs and drew the forlorn little animal up before him on the saddle.  As it stretched out quietly across his thighs, following a half-hearted struggle to escape, Kay saw Don Mike give the orphan his left index finger to suck.

“Not much sustenance in it, is there, old timer?” he addressed the calf.  “Coyotes would have had you tonight if I hadn’t passed by.”

“What a tiny calf,” Kay observed, riding close to pat the sleek head.

“He’s scrubby and interbred; his mother bore him before she had her own growth and a hundred generations of him got the same poor start in life.  You’ve seen people like this little runt.  He really isn’t worth carrying home, but—­”

It occurred to her that his silence was eloquent of the inherent generosity of the man, even as his poetic outburst of a few minutes before had been eloquent of the minstrel in him.  She rode in silence, regarding him critically from time to time, and when they came to the tree where the panther hung he gave her the calf to hold while he deftly skinned the dead marauder, tied the pelt behind his saddle, relieved her of the calf and jogged away toward home.

“Well,” he demanded, presently, “you do not think any the less of me for what I did to your father this afternoon, do you?”

“Of course not.  Nobody likes a mollycoddle,” she retorted.

“A battle of finances between your father and me will not be a very desperate one.  A gnat attacking a tiger.  I shall scarcely interest him.  I am predestined to defeat.”

“But with Mr. Conway’s aid—­”

“Bill’s aid will not amount to very much.  He was always a splendid engineer and an honest builder, but a poor business man.  He might be able to maintain work on the dam for awhile, but in the end lack of adequate finances would defeat us.  And I have no right to ask Bill to sacrifice the profit on this job which your father is willing to pay him, in return for a cancellation of the contract; I have no right to ask or expect Bill Conway to risk a penniless old age for me.  You see, I attacked him at his weakest point—­his heart.  It was selfish of me.”