Mary V waited for the boys, and talked to them prettily, and wondered aloud where her dad was all this time, and hoped he had not had a puncture or anything.  Because, she said, it was bad enough for his temper to have to drive the flivver, without any bad luck to make it worse.

She was particularly nice to Bill, and forced him to confess that she really got along perfectly all right with Jake.  She comported herself so agreeably, in fact, that Bill was reconciled to her coming and paid no attention when she presently swung off to the southeast, saying that she wanted to get a picture of a perfectly ducky giant cactus which she had seen through her glasses one day.  Indeed, the dismal honking of the machine called Bill back to the trail, where Sudden came jouncing along like a little, leaky boat laboring through a choppy sea.  Bill rode off without noticing Mary V at all.

It was a little after noon, and the boys were eating dinner at the camp set up close to the creek at Sinkhole cabin.  Sudden, sprawled in the shade of the wagon, was staring glumly at the sluggish little stream, smoking his after-dinner cigar and trying to formulate some plan that would promise results where results were most vital to his bank account.  It would, of course, take two or three days to gather in all the horses on Sinkhole range, and the restless lot in the corral yonder might be a large or a small part of the entire number down there.  Sudden was not worrying so much over those that were left, as he was over what had been stolen.  It seemed to him that there ought to be some way of getting those horses back.  He was trying to think of the way.

“Oh, Bill!” he called, getting stiffly to his feet.  “Let’s get into the cabin and go over those tally books.”  Which was merely a subterfuge to get Bill away from the wagon without letting the boys know something was wrong.  Bill got up, brushed the dirt off his trousers with a flick of his fingers, lighted the cigarette he had just rolled and followed the boss.

“Bill, what’s your idea about this horse-stealing, anyway?  If they were going to steal horses, why didn’t they run off a whole herd and be done with it?”

Bill seated himself on Johnny’s bunk, spat toward the stove, pulled a splinter off the rough board of the bunk’s side, and began carefully nipping off tiny shreds with his finger nails.  Bill, by all these signs and tokens, was limbering up his keen old range-bred wits for action.

“Well, I’ll tell yuh.  The way to get at the thing is to figger out why you’d do it, s’posin’ you was in their place.  Now if it was me that was stealin’ these hawses—­say, s’posin’ I was aimin’ to sell ’em over across the line—­I’d aim to take the best I could git holt of, because I’d be wanting ’em for good, all-round, tough saddle hawses.  Them greasers, the way they’re hellin’ around over the country shootin’ and fightin’, they got to have good hawses under ’em.  Er they want good hawses, if they can git ’em.