Mr. Graham presently went away to a field where his men were cutting and stacking alfalfa, after thanking Bryant for rendering assistance to his daughter on the road and inviting him to call again.  Louise then showed him her flower garden, ablaze with poppies, nasturtiums, sweet peas, and other blossoms he could not name; and the orchard where apples and pears and plums weighed the branches.  She was remarkably beautiful, he thought; and was quite sure the roses in the garden had no petals pinker or softer than her cheeks, and was sure the water rippling in the little, grassy orchard canals was no clearer than her brown eyes, or the sky more serene than her brow.  She was not in the least proud or vain or haughty, as he imagined when he first beheld her at the ford.  He had had doubts of that after her kindly treatment of his dying dog Mike.  And now to-day he knew that such an opinion did her an injustice, was absurd.

Louise, too, was thinking as they strolled about.  Which of the two girls on Sarita Creek did he love?  For Charlie Menocal had said that he was infatuated with one.  Charlie Menocal!  Her cheeks grew warm.  What he had boasted in regard to herself, and doubtless Mr. Bryant had softened the truth, filled her with anger.  She would treat the insufferable wretch differently hereafter.  And very likely his gossip of the engineer’s feelings for one of the homesteaders was likewise a falsehood, though there was no reason in the world why Mr. Bryant shouldn’t love one of them if he chose.  She had never met them.  They were very nice girls, she imagined.  She had intended to call, but something had always prevented.  As for Mr. Bryant, he seemed a very estimable young man, and good company, and an engineer of ability and will.

She continued to speculate after he and Dave had departed on the stage, with a vague sense of missing them.  That, she reasoned, was because Lee Bryant had “personality.”  And presently her thoughts followed him.  Lee’s mind, however, was ranging back to Sarita Creek; but Dave’s was loyally with the lady of Diamond Creek ranch, as was manifest when he murmured thickly, having fallen asleep during the warm ride: 

“No more chicken, thank you—­or jelly—­or apple pie.”

CHAPTER XI

In Kennard next morning Lee Bryant betook himself to a civil engineering firm, which he engaged to print a number of sets of blue-prints from his tracings, one set to be ready for delivery early that afternoon.  Then while his suit of gray clothes, from out of his suit-case, was being pressed, he and Dave visited a florist, purchased a wreath of lilies-of-the-valley that Dave chose, and went to the cemetery to place it on the grave of the lad’s mother.  After that they proceeded to a clothier’s, where the boy was fitted out with a new suit, a hat, shirts, underwear, and a tie.  All of this caused Dave to swallow hard—­but he swallowed hardest