Here was a new and wholly unsuspected bond of sympathy between them.  Percival would have plunged at once into a dissertation on a subject upon which he considered himself an authority had not the fluttering sheets of the letter stirred vague misgivings in his bosom.

“You aren’t playing fair!” he cried.  “You are telling me what is in your letter without reading it to me.”

“So I am!” She looked over page after page.  “Here, this will do.  It says:  ’I wish you could have been along last night when I hit the trail for the Lower Ranch.  You know what that old road looks like in the moonlight, all deep black in the gorges, and white on the cliffs, and not a dog-gone sound but the hoof-beats of your horse and the clank of the bridle-chains.  Why, when you come out in the open and the wind gets to ripping ’cross the grass-fields, and the moon gets busy with every little old blade, and there’s miles of beauty stretched out far as your eye can reach, I’d back it against any sight in the world.  Only last night I wasn’t thinking much about the scenery.  I was thinking—­’” Bobby stopped short, declaring that she had a cinder in her eye.

“Can’t be a cinder, out here in the bay,” protested Percival.

“Well, it’s whatever they have out here.”

“And sha’n’t I ever know what your friend was thinking?”

“He was probably thinking of his dinner,” said Bobby, gazing at him reassuringly with her free eye.

After she had departed to make sure that the steamer got properly under way, he tortured himself with suspicions.  What possible secrets could she have with this unknown friend, who waxed sentimental over moonlit trails and wind-swept grassfields?  Had not some one told him of an unhappy love-affair?  He searched his memory.  Suddenly there came to him the disturbing figure of a stalwart young man on a broncho, with leather overalls, jingling spurs, a silk handkerchief knotted about his throat, and a pair of keen, humorous eyes lighting up a sun-bronzed face.

Then he smiled at his quick alarm.  Hadn’t she told him it was one of her foster-brothers, one of those lads whom he persisted in regarding as children?  It was the most natural thing in the world that an impulsive, big-hearted creature like Bobby would be on terms of affectionate intimacy with those boys with whom she had been brought up.

He did not feel fully reassured, however, until he put the question to her flatly: 

“That letter you were reading me,” he said at his first opportunity—­“you won’t mind telling me if it is from that chap I saw at the station?”

“I don’t mind telling you.  But you mustn’t tell the captain.”

“The captain?  Oh, to be sure.  Doesn’t fancy your friends, the Fords.  I remember.”

From that time on he boldly and openly entered the lists for Bobby’s favor.  The ten days he had allowed himself to drift with the tide of his inclination were passing with incredible swiftness, and he resorted to every means, from the subtlest strategy to the most domineering insolence, to monopolize every waking moment of her time.