“I’ll say she has,” Bill surrendered, a grin splitting his leathery face straight across the middle.  “I been watchin’ Tex myself, but I didn’t know it was horses he was after.  I thought it was some woman.”

“I can’t see what makes men so stupid!” Mary V observed pensively.  “I never did like Tex.  I don’t like his eyes.”

“I see,” said her dad.  “You ought to ’ve told me before.”  And he added disapprovingly, “There’s a good deal you ought to ’ve told your dad.  It would have saved the Rolling R some mighty fine horses, I reckon.  I don’t know what your mother’s going to say about me letting you go—­”

But Mary V had whisked into the house to complete her preparations for the day’s ride.  Also to escape whatever her dad would have to say in that particular tone.  She saw him leave the porch and follow Bill to the corral, whereupon she immediately tried to call Johnny on the telephone.  Failing in that, she proceeded to powder her nose.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

MARY V WILL NOT BE BLUFFED

Old Sudden in the ranch Ford, and Bill and Mary V on horseback, overtook the jogging cavalcade of riders and loose horses.  Sudden looked pained and full of determination, as he always did when necessity called him forth upon the range in a lurching mechanical conveyance where once he had ridden with the best of them.  Too many winters had been spent luxuriously in the towns; a mile or two, at a comfortable trail trot, was all that Sudden cared to attempt nowadays on horseback.  But that did not lessen his dislike of negotiating sand and rocks and washes and rough slopes with an automobile.  Every mile that he traveled added something to his condemnation of that young reprobate, Johnny Jewel, who had let the Rolling R in for all this trouble.

A bend in the trail brought him close to the boys, who had ridden straight across country.  Mary V and Bill had just joined the group, and Sudden gave a snort when he saw Mary V maneuver Jake so that he sidled in alongside Tex, who rode a little apart with his hat pulled over his eyes, evidently in deep thought.  Sudden had all the arrogance of a strong man who has managed his life and his business successfully.  He wanted to attend to Tex himself, without any meddling from Mary V.

He squawked the horn to attract her attention, and caused a wave of turbulence among the horses that made more than one of his men say unpleasant things about him.  Mary V looked back, and he beckoned with one sweeping gesture that could scarcely be mistaken.  Mary V turned to ride up to him, advanced a rod or two and abruptly retreated, bolting straight through the group of riders and careening away across the level, with Bill and Tex tearing after her.  Presently they slowed, and later Bill was seen to lag behind.  Tex and Mary V kept straight on, a furlong in advance of the others.