t
his meals in the house. Mrs. Kate was a nice woman; Ford would tell any
man so in perfect sincerity. He even considered her nice looking, with
her smooth, brown hair which was never disordered, her fine, clear skin,
her white teeth, her clear blue eyes, and her immaculate shirt-waists.
But she was not a comfortable woman to be with; an ordinary human
wearied of adjusting his speech, his manners, and his morals to her
standard of propriety. Ford, quietly studying matrimony from the
well-ordered example before him, began to congratulate himself upon not
being able to locate his own wife--since accident had afflicted him with
one. When he stopped, during these first busy days at the Double Cross,
to think deeply or seriously upon the mysterious entanglement he had
fallen into, he was inclined to the opinion that he had had a narrow
escape. The woman might have remained in Sunset--and Ford flinched at
the thought.

As to Josephine, Ford's thoughts dwelt with her oftener than they did
with Mrs. Kate. The thought of her roused a certain resentment which
bordered closely upon dislike. Still, she piqued his interest; for a
week she was invisible to him, yet her presence in the house created a
tangible atmosphere which he felt but could not explain. His first sight
of her--beyond a fleeting glimpse once or twice through the window--had
been that day when he had helped Mason carry her and her big chair into
the dining-room. The brief contact had left with him a vision of the
delicate parting in her soft, brown hair, and of long, thick lashes
which curled daintily up from the shadow they made on her cheeks. He did
not remember ever having seen a woman with such eyelashes. They impelled
him to glance at her oftener than he would otherwise have done, and to
wonder, now and then, if they did not make her eyes seem darker than
they really were. He thought it strange that he had not noticed her
lashes that day when he carried her from the house and back again--until
he remembered that at first his haste had been extreme, and that when
he took her from the bunk-house she had stared at him so that he would
not look at her.

He did not know that Ches Mason was observant of his rather frequent
glances at her during the meal, and he would have resented Mason's
diagnosis of that particular symptom of interest. Ford would, if put to
the question, have maintained quite sincerely that he was perfectly
indifferent to Josephine, but that she