The road swung away to the right, to avoid a rough stretch of rocks and gullies, and Sudden perforce followed it, feelingly speaking his mind upon the subjects of spoiled daughters and good-for-nothing employees, and horses and the men that bestrode them, and Fords, and the roads of Arizona, and the curse of being too well fed and growing a paunch that made riding a martyrdom.  He would put that girl in a convent, and he would see that she stayed there till she was old enough to have some sense.  He would have that young hound at Sinkhole arrested as an accomplice of the horse thieves.  He would put a bullet through that fool of a horse, Jake, and he would lynch Tex if he ever got his hands on him.  He would sell out, by glory, and buy himself a prune orchard.

And then he had a blow-out while he was down in a hollow a mile from the outfit.  And some darned fool had lost the handle to the jack, and the best of the two extra tires was a darn poor excuse and wouldn’t last a mile, probably, and he got hold of a tube that had a leaky valve, and had to hunt out another one after he had worked half an hour trying to pump up the first one.  And what in the blinkety blink did any darn fool want to live in such a country for, anyway?

Thus it happened that Mary V was not forbidden to ride with Tex.  And, not being forbidden, Mary V carried out her own ideas of diplomacy and tact.  Her idea was to make Tex believe that she liked him better than the other boys.  Just what she would gain by that, Mary V did not stop to wonder.  It was the approved form of diplomacy, employed by all the leading heroines of ancient and modern fiction and of film drama, and was warranted to produce results in the way of information, guilty secrets, stolen wills, plots and plans and papers.

Tex was inclined to eye her askance, just at first.  He was also very curious about her riding Jake, and he seemed inquisitive about whether that was the first time she had ever ridden him.  He was, too, very absent-minded at times, and would go off into vacant-eyed reveries that sealed his ears against her artfully artless chatter.

Some girls would have been discouraged.  Mary V was merely stimulated to further efforts.  Tex did not mention the stealing of any horses at Sinkhole.  He seemed to take it for granted that they were going to work the range to get horses for breaking, and Mary V wondered if perhaps her dad had not thought it best to confine the knowledge of horse-stealing to himself and Bill—­at least until he had made an investigation.  That would be like dad—­and also like Bill Hayden.  Mary V was glad that she had not said anything about it.  She thought she would try Tex out first on the subject of airplanes.  None of the boys knew that Johnny had one, and she was perfectly sure that she would detect any guilty knowledge of it in the mind of Tex.  She had just read a long article in a magazine about “How our Faces Betray our Thoughts,” and this seemed a splendid chance to put it to the test.