.

"She's caught on. There's no mistake about that. I guess it's time for
you to hustle, Mr. Rob."

Mount Dunstan laughed again. Jem Salter had heard voices like it, and
cheerful slang phrases of the same order in his ranch days. On the other
side of his park fence there was evidently sitting, through some odd
chance, an American of the cheery, casual order, not sufficiently
polished by travel to have lost his picturesque national
characteristics.

Mount Dunstan put a hand on a broken panel of fence and leaped over into
the road.

A bicycle was lying upon the roadside grass, and on the bank, looking as
though he had been sheltering himself under the hedge from the rain, sat
a young man in a cheap bicycling suit. His features were sharply cut and
keen, his cap was pushed back from his forehead, and he had a pair of
shrewdly careless boyish eyes.

Mount Dunstan liked the look of him, and seeing his natural start at the
unheralded leap over the gap, which was quite close to him, he spoke.

"Good-morning," he said. "I am afraid I startled you."

"Good-morning," was the response. "It was a bit of a jolt seeing you
jump almost over my shoulder. Where did you come from? You must have
been just behind me."

"I was," explained Mount Dunstan. "Standing in the park listening to the
robin."

The young fellow laughed outright.

"Say," he said, "that was pretty fine, wasn't it? Wasn't he getting it
off his chest! He was an English robin, I guess. American robins are
three or four times as big. I liked that little chap. He was a winner."

"You are an American?"

"Sure," nodding. "Good old Stars and Stripes for mine. First time I've
been here. Came part for business and part for pleasure. Having the time
of my life."

Mount Dunstan sat down beside him. He wanted to hear him talk. He had
liked to hear the ranchmen talk. This one was of the city type, but his
genial conversational wanderings would be full of quaint slang and good
spirits. He was quite ready to converse, as was made manifest by his
next speech.

"I'm biking through the country because I once had an old grandmother
that was English, and she was always talking about English country, and
how green things was, and how there was hedges instead of rail fences.
She thought there was nothing like little old England. Well, as far as
roads and hedges go, I'm with her. They're all right. I wanted a fellow
I met crossing, to come with me, but he took a Cook's trip