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“Good morning. Is–er–Mr. Johnson at home?” He came near saying “Take-Notice,” but caught himself in time. Take-Notice Johnson was what men called the man whom Andy had ridden over to see upon a more or less trivial matter.

“He isn’t, but he will be back–if you care to wait.” She spoke with a certain preciseness which might be natural or artificial, and she stood in the doorway with no symptoms of immediate disappearance.

Andy slid over a bit in the saddle, readjusted his hat so that its brim would shield his eyes from the sunlight, and prepared to be friendly. “Oh, I’ll wait,” he said easily. “I’ve got all the time there is. Would you mind if I smoked a cigarette?”

“Indeed, I was wishing you would,” she told him, with surprising frankness. “I’ve so longed to see a dashing young cowboy roll a cigarette with deft, white fingers.”

Andy, glancing at her startled, spilled much tobacco down the front of him, stopped to brush it away and let the lazy breeze snatch the tiny oblong of paper from between his unwatchful fingers. Of course, she was joshing him, he thought uneasily, as he separated the leaves of his cigarette book by blowing gently upon them, and singled out another paper. “Are yuh so new to the country that it’s anything of a treat?” he asked guardedly.

“Yes, I’m new. I’m what you people call a pilgrim. Don’t you do it with one hand? I thought–oh, yes! You hold the reins between your firm, white teeth while you roll–“

“Lady, I never travelled with no show,” Andy protested mildly and untruthfully. Was she just joshing? Or didn’t she know any better? She looked sober as anything, but somehow her eyes kind of–

“You see, I know some things about you. Those are chaps” (Heavens! She called them the way they are spelled, without the soft sound of s!) “That you’re wearing for–trousers” (Andy blushed modestly. He was not wearing them “for trousers”.), “and you’ve got jingling rowels at your heels, and those are taps–“

“You’re going to be shy a yard or two of calico if that black lamb-critter has his say-so,” Andy cut in remorselessly, and hastily made and lighted his cigarette while she was rescuing her blue calico skirt from the jaws of the black lamb and puckering her eyebrows over the chewed place. When her attention was once more given to him, he was smoking as unobtrusively as possible, and he was gazing at her with a good deal of speculative admiration. He looked hastily down at the lambs. “Mary had two little lambs,” he murmured inanely.

“They’re not mine,” she informed him, taking him seriously–or seeming to do so. Andy had some trouble deciding just how much of her was sincere. “They were here when I came, and I can’t take them back with me, so there’s no use in claiming them. They’d be such a nuisance on the train–“

“I reckon they would,” Andy agreed, “if yuh had far to go.”

“Well, you can’t call San Jose close,” she observed, meditatively. “It takes four days to come.”

“You’re a long way from home. Does it–are yuh homesick, ever?” Andy was playing for information without asking directly how long she intended to stay–a question which had suddenly seemed quite important. Also, why was she stopping here with Take-Notice Johnson, away off from everybody?

“Seeing I’ve only been here four days, the novelty hasn’t worn off yet,” she replied. “But it does seem more like four weeks; and how I’ll ever stand two months of it, not ever seeing a soul but father–“

Andy looked reproachful, and also glad. Didn’t she consider him a soul? And Take-Notice was her dad! To be sure, Take-Notice had never mentioned having a daughter, but then, in the range-land, men don’t go around yawping their personal affairs.

Before Take-Notice returned, Andy felt that he had accomplished much. He had learned that the young woman’s name really was Mary, and that she was a stenographer in a real-estate office in San Jose, where her mother lived; that the confinement of office-work had threatened her with pulmonary tuberculosis (Andy failed, at the moment, to recognize the disease which had once threatened him also, and wondered vaguely) and that the doctor had advised her coming to Montana for a couple of months; that she had written to her father (it seemed queer to have anyone speak of old Take-Notice as “father”) and that he had told her to “come a-running.”