“To do what?” asked Mrs. Baldwin.

“I don’t know what,” chuckled the Dean; “but he’s bound to do some fool thing or other just to see if he can, and it’ll be somethin’ that nobody but him would ever think of doin’, too.”

But Honorable Patches did not get lost that day—­that is, not too badly lost.  There was a time, though—­but that does not belong just here.

Patches was very well pleased with the task assigned to him that morning.  For the first time he found himself trusted alone with a horse, on a mission that would keep him the full day in the saddle, and would take him beyond sight of the ranch house.  Very bravely he set out, equipped with his cowboy regalia—­except the riata, which the Dean, fearing experiments, had, at the last moment, thoughtfully borrowed—­and armed with a fencing tool and staples.  He was armed, too, with a brand-new “six-gun” in a spick and span holster, on a shiny belt of bright cartridges.  The Dean had insisted on this, alleging that the embryo cowboy might want it to kill a sick cow or something.

Patches wondered if he would know a sick cow if he should meet one, or how he was to diagnose the case to ascertain if she were sick enough to kill.

The first thing he did, when the Dean was safely out of sight, was to dismount and examine his saddle girth.  Always your real king of the cattle range is careful for the foundation of his throne.  But there was no awkwardness, now, when he again swung to his seat.  The young man was in reality a natural athlete.  His work had already taken the soreness and stiffness out of his unaccustomed muscles, and he seemed, as the Dean had said, a born horseman.  And as he rode, he looked about over the surrounding country with an expression on independence, freedom and fearlessness very different from the manner of the troubled man who had faced Phil Acton that night on the Divide.  It was as though the spirit of the land was already working its magic within this man, too.  He patted the holster at his side, felt the handle of the gun, lovingly fingered the bright cartridges in his shiny belt, leaned sidewise to look admiringly down at his fringed, leather chaps and spur ornamented boot heels, and wished for his riata—­not forgetting, meanwhile, to scan the fence for places that might need his attention.

The guardian angel who cares for the “tenderfoot” was good to Patches that day, and favored him with many sagging wires and leaning or broken posts, so that he could not ride far.  Being painstaking and conscientious in his work, he had made not more than four miles by the beginning of the afternoon.  Then he found a break that would occupy him for two hours at least.  With rueful eyes he surveyed the long stretch of dilapidated fence.  It was time, he reflected, that the Dean sent someone to look after his property, and dismounting, he went to work, forgetting, in his interest in the fencing problem, to insure his