“Keep her sou’ by sou’east, and all sail set.  You see that black speck on the horizon under that lowermost Gulf cloud?  That’s a group of live-oaks and a landmark.  Steer halfway between that and the little hill to the left.  I’ll recite you the whole code of driving rules for the Texas prairies:  keep the reins from under the horses’ feet, and swear at ’em frequent.”

“I’m too happy to swear, Ted.  Oh, why do people buy yachts or travel in palace-cars, when a buckboard and a pair of plugs and a spring morning like this can satisfy all desire?”

“Now, I’ll ask you,” protested Teddy, who was futilely striking match after match on the dashboard, “not to call those denizens of the air plugs.  They can kick out a hundred miles between daylight and dark.”  At last he succeeded in snatching a light for his cigar from the flame held in the hollow of his hands.

“Room!” said Octavia, intensely.  “That’s what produces the effect.  I know now what I’ve wanted—­scope—­range—­room!”

“Smoking-room,” said Teddy, unsentimentally.  “I love to smoke in a buckboard.  The wind blows the smoke into you and out again.  It saves exertion.”

The two fell so naturally into their old-time goodfellowship that it was only by degrees that a sense of the strangeness of the new relations between them came to be felt.

“Madama,” said Teddy, wonderingly, “however did you get it into your bead to cut the crowd and come down here?  Is it a fad now among the upper classes to trot off to sheep ranches instead of to Newport?”

“I was broke, Teddy,” said Octavia, sweetly, with her interest centred upon steering safely between a Spanish dagger plant and a clump of chaparral; “I haven’t a thing in the world but this ranch—­not even any other home to go to.”

“Come, now,” said Teddy, anxiously but incredulously, “you don’t mean it?”

“When my husband,” said Octavia, with a shy slurring of the word, “died three months ago I thought I had a reasonable amount of the world’s goods.  His lawyer exploded that theory in a sixty-minute fully illustrated lecture.  I took to the sheep as a last resort.  Do you happen to know of any fashionable caprice among the gilded youth of Manhattan that induces them to abandon polo and club windows to become managers of sheep ranches?”

“It’s easily explained in my case,” responded Teddy, promptly.  “I had to go to work.  I couldn’t have earned my board in New York, so I chummed a while with old Sandford, one of the syndicate that owned the ranch before Colonel Beaupree bought it, and got a place down here.  I wasn’t manager at first.  I jogged around on ponies and studied the business in detail, until I got all the points in my head.  I saw where it was losing and what the remedies were, and then Sandford put me in charge.  I get a hundred dollars a month, and I earn it.”

“Poor Teddy!” said Octavia, with a smile.

“You needn’t.  I like it.  I save half my wages, and I’m as hard as a water plug.  It beats polo.”