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Parker’s appreciation of this brilliant sally seemed to threaten the underpinning of the kitchen.

Eben smiled up into his daughter’s face as he lathered his hairy hands.

“I wouldn’t make out much at livin’ by myself, Idy,” he said gently.

“You ain’t goin’ to get a chance,” rejoined his daughter, rushing back to her sputtering skillet, and spearing the pieces of chicken energetically; “you ain’t goin’ to get red o’ me, no matter how sassy you are; I’m here to stay.”

“Hold on now,” warned Parker; “mind what you’re sayin’.”

“I know what I’m sayin’,” retorted the girl, tossing her head. “I’d just like to see the man that could coax me away from pappy.”

“You’d like to see ‘im, would ye?” roared Parker, slapping his knee. “Come, now, that’s pretty good. Mebbe if you’d look, ye might ketch a glimpse of ‘im settin’ ’round som’er’s.”

The girl lifted the skillet from the stove, and let the flame flare up to hide her blushes.

“He wouldn’t be settin’ ’round,” she asserted indignantly, jabbing the fire with her fork. “He’d be up an’ comin’, you c’n bet on that.”

“What’s Idy gettin’ off now?” drawled Mrs. Starkweather from the other room.

“Gettin’ off her base,” answered Parker jocosely. Nevertheless, the wit of his inamorata rankled, and after dinner he went with Eben to the barn to “hitch up.”

“Idy wants to go over to Elsmore this afternoon,” said Eben, “an’ I promised to go ‘long; but I’d ought to stay with the grubbin’. If you was calc’latin’ to lay off anyhow, mebbe you wouldn’t mind the ride. The broncos hain’t been used much sence I commenced on the greasewood, and I don’t quite like to have ‘er go alone.”

“She hadn’t ought to go alone,” broke in Parker eagerly. “That pinto o’ yourn’s goin’ to kick some o’ ye into the middle o’ next week, one o’ these days. I was just thinkin’ I’d foot it over to the store fer some bacon. Tell Idy to wait till I run up to the house an’ get my gun.”

Idy waited, rather impatiently, and rejected with contempt her escort’s proposal to take the lines.

“When I’m scared o’ this team, I’ll let ye know,” she informed him, giving the pinto a cut with the whip that sent his heels into the air. “If ye don’t like my drivin’, ye c’n invite yerself to ride with somebody else. I’m a-doin’ this.”

The afternoon was steeped in the warm fragrance of a California spring. Every crease and wrinkle in the velvet of the encircling hills was reflected in the blue stillness of the laguna. Patches of poppies blazed like bonfires on the mesa, and higher up the faint smoke of the blossoming buckthorn tangled its drifts in the chaparral. Bees droned in the wild buckwheat, and powdered themselves with the yellow of the mustard, and now and then the clear, staccato voice of the meadow-lark broke into the drowsy quiet–a swift little dagger of sound.

“The barley’s headin’ out fast.” Parker raised his voice above the rattle of the wagon. “I wished now I’d ‘a’ put in that piece of Harrington’s.”

“Harvest’s a poor time fer wishin’; it’s more prof’table ‘long about seedin’-time,” said Idy, with a smile that threatened the meshes of her stylishly drawn veil.

Parker set one foot on the dashboard, and swung the other out of the wagon nervously.

“I do a good deal o’ wishin’ now that ain’t very prof’table–time o’ year don’t seem to make much difference,” he said plaintively.

“Well, I guess if I wanted anything I wouldn’t wish fer it a great while–not if I could set to work an’ get it.”

The vim of this remark seemed to communicate itself to the pinto through the tightened rein, and sent him forward with accelerated speed.

Parker glanced at his companion from under the conical shapelessness of his old felt hat, but she kept her eyes on the team, and gave him her jaunty profile behind its tantalizing barrier of meshes and dots.