First she sidled up to a window and listened, then peered in.  She could see nothing, for the moon had slid over toward the west, and the room was a blur of shade.  But it was also silent, depressingly silent.  She crept around to the door, and found that it was fastened on the outside.

That heartened her a little.  She undid the rawhide string and pushed the door open a little way.  Nothing happened.  She pushed it a little farther, listened, grew bolder—­yet frightened with a new fear—­and stepped inside.

It was very quiet.  It was so quiet that Mary V held her breath and was tempted to turn and run away.  She waited for a minute, her nostrils widened to the pent odor of stale cigarette smoke that clings to a bachelor’s cabin in warm weather.  She tiptoed across the room to where Johnny’s cot stood and timidly passed her hands above the covers.  Emboldened by its flat emptiness, Mary V turned and felt along the window ledge where she had seen that Johnny kept his matches, found the box, and lighted a match.

The flare showed her the empty room.  Oddly, she stared at the telephone as though she expected it to reveal something.  Some one had stood there and had talked with her.  And Johnny was not at camp at all; had not been, since—­

With a truly feminine instinct she turned to the crude cupboard and looked in.  She inspected a dish of brown beans, sniffed and wrinkled her nose.  They were sour, and the ones on top were dried with long standing.  Johnny’s biscuits, on a tin plate, were hard and dry.  Not a thing in that cupboard looked as though it had been cooked later than two or three days before.

A reaction of rage seized Mary V. She went out, tied the door shut with two spitefully hard-drawn knots, mounted Jake without a thought of his height or his dancing accomplishments, and headed for home at a gallop.

She hated Johnny Jewel every step of the way.  I suppose it is exasperating to ride a forbidden, treasured horse on a forbidden, possibly dangerous night journey to rescue a man from some unknown peril, and discover that the young man is not at hand to be rescued.  Mary V seemed to find it so.  She decided that Johnny Jewel was up to some devilment, and had probably hired that man to answer the ’phone for him so her dad would not know he was gone.  He thought he was very clever, of course—­putting the man up to pretending he had a cold, just to fool her dad.  Well, he had fooled her dad, all right, but there happened to be a person on the ranch he could not fool.  That person hoped she was smarter than Johnny Jewel, and to prove it she would find out what it was he was trying to be so secret about.  And then she would confront him with the proof, and then where would he be?

She certainly owed it to the outfit—­to her dad—­to find out what was going on.  There was no use, she told herself virtuously, in worrying her dad about it until she knew just exactly what that miserable Johnny Jewel was up to.  Poor dad had enough to worry about without filling his mind with suspicious and mysterious men with fake colds, and things like that.